Rebuilding My Playbook .. Knowledge Base

I find myself in the situation where I lost my personal playbook by user error. I accidentally deleted the VM where I ran xWiki where it was kept and did not realized the mistake until days later. Even if painful to rebuild it is a good opportunity to think on how to better organize it and put it in a more flexible format.  

I Initially called my collection of techniques as playbook, but in reality they where not one. It was simply a collection from which I wold pull depending on the situation and as reference when writing presentations, blog posts and reports. To me a playbook is a collections of plays, each play composing of multiple steps that would vary depending environment and purpose. So the term playbook really did not fit. As I rebuild now I have decided to call it a Knowledge Base. By calling it a Knowledge Base this gives me the advantage to properly later build a real playbook where I can cover small samples of multiple steps and tools together that I can pull in to planning in to the different stages using the PACE (stands for Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency) principal where it makes sense. 

If you have ever taken the OSCP Exam from OffensiveSecurity you have learned the importance of having a knowledge base with the right information. You also learn as you progress through the material and labs to build and hopefully not fail on the first try.

Read More

Operational Look at Sysinternals Sysmon 6.20 Update

Sysmon has been a game changer for many organizations allowing their teams to fine tune their detection of malicious activity when combined with tools that aggregate and correlate events.  

A new version of Symon was recently released. Version 6.20 fixes bugs and adds new features. Some the of the note worthy changes for me are:

  • Enhancements in WMI Logging. 
  • Ability to change driver name. 
  • Ability to change service name and service executable name.
Read More

Some Comments and Thoughts on Tradecraft

in , ,

I have been writing a series on the new Windows Defender Exploit Guard features on Attack Surface Reduction where I cover my research on it. I'm researching the controls to add the information in to my personal playbook. Surprisingly in conversations with some Red Teamers I know they dismissed the information as it is a Blue/Defense technology. These comments surprised me and I would like to share why it surprised me.

Let me start by saying that this is only an opinion. The steps and tradecraft for me would vary on level of skill of the defenders, scope, time and rule of engagements. This is blog post is only for me to share my though process and opinions on this area.

When it comes to attack and defense, red and blue, attack simulation. However, you want to call it in its essence it is an adversarial process, it is one team or person against another. Sometimes it can be a attacker against a defender or it can even be the attacker against a vendor research team that adds new features or modifies existing one. But it is one person trying to outwit another. So, if you are an attacker why are you not studying about defenses and mitigations?

What is the purpose of a red team or pentester? For me it is to show alternate ways of thinking and exercise the current controls in place to show areas of improvement to mitigate risks. To be able to do this knowledge on how systems works, how different lack of controls or misconfigured ones can have a negative impact for a given customer environment is of the upmost importance.

When it comes to the tradecraft one applies it will depend on the red team exercise you are conducting. If you are performing a simulation of a specific threat with blue your TTPs will be dictated by the threat intelligence you have on the adversary you are simulating to test the controls.

Knowledge of one’s tools, the opponent, his tools and how each implements them and uses them determines the actions. As Sun Tzu said:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Read More

Windows Defender Exploit Guard ASR Rules for Office

in ,

On this blog post I continue looking at the ASR rules, this time I'm looking at the ASR rules for Office.  The ASR rules for office are:

  • Block Office applications from creating child processes
  • Block Office applications from creating executable content
  • Block Office applications from injecting code into other processes
  • Block Win32 API calls from Office macro

These rules only work on the following versions of Microsoft Office on Windows 10, version 1709 (and later) with Windows Defender configured with Real-Time protection enabled:

  • Microsoft Office 365
  • Microsoft Office 2016
  • Microsoft Office 2013
  • Microsoft Office 2010

Another thing to take in to account is that these controls only work with the following Office applications:

  • Microsoft Word
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Microsoft OneNote

for my testing I will use Word 2016 and Excel for my tests of the feature. 

Read More