Category: general

news and random posts

The fallacy of ‘manual work’ being faster

Like many people, due to recent events, I’ve had more time to reflect on myself and on some of my mistakes. I’ve always been a fan of sharing knowledge, that includes failures and the things you learn from them. So here is one of those failure from which upon self reflecting I’ve learned to change that behavior.

Sometimes you already knew something was true, but you just kept lying to yourself. This is even worse when you have recommended other people to do what you still refuse to do yourself, because you keep lying to yourself. The recommendation is good, the part where you don’t follow your own recommendation, that’s where it all goes down the drain. If you are wondering what I’m talking about, I’m talking about:

Doing all kinds of tasks manually, because in that precise moment it was the ‘quick’ option

The above is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years, mainly because during my day job my work is less technical. This is the wrong approach, even if I told myself otherwise. The interesting part is that during this time I coached and advised people around me to:

  • stick to (further) learning programming languages
  • Learn devops
  • Take the time to automate and learn how to automate
  • Don’t worry about being slow now, it will pay off

So why then, did I not follow my own advise? Because besides the reason of it being quicker to do manually, I also told myself that by doing it manually it would be easier to retain technical knowledge.

Now this blog has turned up two fallacies:

  • Thinking that doing it manually is quicker
  • Thinking that by doing it manually you retain knowledge

Both of them are incorrect, that much is obvious, but why?

The first one is incorrect because the moments that warrant that ‘quickness’ in that precise moment are not as many as you’ve been telling yourself. My experience is that in a lot of cases it was perfectly fine to grab a couple of hours or a day or two to automate it. I actually experienced this, since other people with the exact same problem took the advise and automated it. They could later indeed benefit from their work and the more often that they automated tasks, the faster they could do it.

The second one is incorrect, because in a sense you are training yourself to:

Re-learn the same knowledge over and over again

Instead of learning something, documenting it and being able to go back to it. You are learning something, doing it by hand and then forgetting it. Yes you might retain some of it, but eventually it will fade. So if you need to do it again, you need to re-learn it again instead of referencing it and building upon your previous knowledge. I knew this all along, since I often went back to older scripts and code I wrote. I just never took the time to keep doing that when my day job diminished the amount of time I spent on technical problems. Somehow the reward of doing something fast in that precise moment, was bigger than automating it and reaping the benefits. The illusions and tricks the mind plays on you are truly magical.

To get myself going again, I decided to automate a thing I’ve been doing manually for the last couple of years, which is configuring a newly installed Ubuntu VM. The ansible setup is not perfect, but at least I’ve begun to automate it:

https://github.com/DiabloHorn/env-automata

I hope that other people in similar situations benefit from this self reflection and that they don’t fall for the same fallacy.

vysolator: vyos virtual network isolation

Sometimes projects are just born out of pure frustration, this is one of those projects. I’ve probably build like a dozen VyOS configurations to virtually isolate networks and virtual machines on my host. I  briefly touched upon this subject a couple of years ago when I wrote about stashing ESXi inside VMware workstation to achive a portable lab. Since then I’ve build multiple versions, to either ensure that Red Team operations and regular penetration tests are able to contain the breach to a single virtual machine or to enable training networks with multiple networks and clients. If we visualize a simple setup it looks like this:

This compartmentalizes potential breaches to their own segment. In this case each segment has a single VM, but it could contain multiple VMs. Yes, the virtualization layer becomes a single point of failure. I still think it adds value from most attacks that you could suffer. Including the usual surfing the internet and getting pwned one.

So here is a repo which contains the instructions and example config file to get you (read: most probably future me) started. The current setup ensures that you have one mgmt segment and one internet only segment. That means, you can manage your VyOS from the mgmt segment if you place a VM in it. You can browse the internet and nothing else if you place a VM in the internet only segment.

Whenever I build more segments that lend themselves to be of generic use I’ll update the repo. Feel free to send pull requests with either alternative configurations or improvements and segment expansion on the current one. @donnymaasland, already had a sneak preview and submitted some improvements. You can view the historical commits to review the improvements as well as some personal preferences on rules.

On and yes, I do agree that Qubes OS is a superior solution, however this is more versatile. Also this does not have the same threat model that Qubes OS has. For those wondering about the threat model for this, here is a quick summary of it / the intended features:

      • Contain regular breaches to a single segment
      • Protect against regular attacks
      • Not intended to withstand targeted or advanced attacks
      • Avoid user mistakes by enforcing network ACLs from a central system
        • Improve ease of use by just requiring users to place VMs in the right segment
      • Aid Red Team / Pentest to not fuckup when they have to use specific exit IP addresses

Lessons learned on written social engineering attacks

I’ve had some interesting conversations on the topic of performing social engineering attacks via email and decided to share some of my past lessons learned. The focus will not be so much on the technical side as it will be much more focused on the social aspect. Although much of today’s written social engineering attacks are carried out using email, there are other written communication methods which can and should be used depending on your objectives.

The social aspect for me concerns the journey from the moment the victim receives the email until the moment that your objective is achieved. Whereby the objective often relates to infecting the victim it could also involve having the victim send you some documents or perform other actions. The victim’s social journey is something that can be influenced, but in my experience it is not something that you’ll fully control.

When I started out with attacking organizations and individuals I was often under the impression that everything should work on the first try. This of course is not true. What is true, is that you should assume failure and put some thought and effort into the consequences. One of the more important lessons I learned early on in regards to performing social engineering via written media is:

It really doesn’t matter, nobody cares.

Have you ever looked at your own communication? have you ever worked in a SOC or followed up on incidents? Eventually most companies as well as victims are pretty tired of the endless stream of shit that they receive on a daily basis. So yes, there will be investigations, they might even follow-up on your attack, but then what? It’s not like they can block all senders or block the entire internet or forbid their employees from working and talking to potential customers, partners, vendors right? So yeah, you guessed it right, if you mess up:

You get to try it again, and again and again…

Of course there are some exceptions like when you really mess up and they figure out you’ve been hired to attack them or if you technically have a ‘tell’ which would enable them to block all incoming attacks pretty quickly. Although…how would they block you across all possible communication channels that their employees use?

Anyhow I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s talk about some war stories and I hope you learn as much as I did from them. As usual I garbled up a lot of information, timelines and other details to attempt some anonymization. Oh and yes, the technical part of these attacks eventually matters, specially if you have to get some code execution, but with the proper social engineering context this can sometimes become much, much easier to perform.

Continue reading “Lessons learned on written social engineering attacks”

Old Skool Red Team

Today I stumbled upon the tweet from Dominic Chell which was about this article that he wrote. This triggered a feeling of nostalgia of the era during which red team was still not a very familiar term with most of the clients. This triggered me to write up the story of a red team that I participated in around ~2010. To ensure that some details remain hidden, I’ve mixed in a couple of techniques from other red teams that I participated in around the same period. Although I’d almost bet that the gaps in my memory are enough to obfuscate the most important details :P

You might be wondering, why write up something old and probably with zero relevance to the actual state of defense today? The reason is exactly that, to hopefully provide insight in how clients and technology have evolved to make it more difficult for adversaries not only to get in, but to remain undetected. In addition I hope that the mistakes that we made back then enable other people to learn from.

If you feel that you are suddenly hoping that you would have done red teams back then, don’t feel sad. There is a big probability that in another ~10 years you will look back and think: Whoa, red teaming was pretty easy around ~2019.

If you enjoy stories from the past, keep on reading.

Continue reading “Old Skool Red Team”

Notes on ZFS / Solaris forensics

A while ago I wrote a script to perform what I called poor man’s forensics. The script was meant as a way to utilize the native operating system to extract some minimal data from exotic filesystems to be able to create a timeline and identify possible abnormalities. As a reminder to myself here are some additional raw notes, commands and resources on performing (forensic || incident response || compromise assessments) investigations on ZFS / Solaris environments. I encountered ZFS / Solaris during some of the FoxCert investigations I participated in.

These raw notes are by no means complete and you must definitely not follow these blindly and always ensure you are working on a copy of a copy of a copy of the real evidence.

Continue reading “Notes on ZFS / Solaris forensics”

Remote NTLM relaying through meterpreter on Windows port 445

The hijacking of port 445 to perform relay attacks or hash capturing attacks has been a recurring topic for a while now. When you infect a target with meterpreter, how do you listen on port 445? A few weeks ago this topic resurfaced again in part due to Dirk-jan (@_dirkjan) that saw this question flying by in the #bloodhoundgang slack channel and asked me to look into it. This sounded like fun to figure out and he promised that if it worked, he’d document a working setup that would be able to perform SMB relay attacks through meterpreter. Turns out, this is an already solved problem with readily available tools out there, but not a lot of people are aware about the solution.

We will explain how you can leverage these tools to perform relay attacks on a target on which you have a meterpreter session. The added benefit of this approach is the fact that you don’t need python2exe or a whole python stack on the infected host, just a simple driver and a meterpreter infection will do the trick.

The first part of this blog will focus on the thought process of being able to hijack port 445 and the second part of this entry will focus on making it usable for relay attacks. If you want to skip the thought process and relay setup you can also skip directly to the already available solution:

The rest of this entry is divided into the following sections:

  • Who is the owner of port 445?
  • Hijacking and redirecting port 445
  • The full SMB relay setup through meterpreter

Please note that we took the easy route while writing this blog post and just put all the files on the disk. If you want to avoid that we suggest that you use a ram disk solution or expand the current meterpreter in-memory execution functionality to support something similar to this.

In addition there is a high probability that you either have to recompile the source of the solution statically to ensure you won’t be needing additional DDL files or you’ll have to bundle those DLL files. All this is however left as an exercise to the reader ;)
Continue reading “Remote NTLM relaying through meterpreter on Windows port 445”

Creating a ram disk through meterpreter

The magical ‘in memory execution‘ option of meterpreter is of course one of the better options that we as attackers love to use. However if you want to store ‘random files’ in memory or need to execute more complex applications which contain dependencies on other files, there is no ‘in memory’ option for that as far as i know. To be more specific, on Linux you can do it with build in commands, on Windows you need to install third party software (list of ram drive software). I decided to dig into it and see if I could achieve this through a meterpreter session. The reasons for wanting a ram disk are multiple, if you are still wondering:

  • store stolen data in memory only, until you can move it
  • execute applications which require multiple files
  • running multiple legitimate files from memory

You might be asking, why not use it to bypass AV? This is of course possible, but you would need to modify the driver for this to work and ask Microsoft to sign it. To bypass AV there are enough methods available in my opinion, I sometimes just want to be able to store multiple files in memory.

Where to start? I decided to start with the ImDisk utility for two reason:

  • It is open source
  • It has a signed driver

The first reason allows me to better understand the under the hood stuff, the second reason allows me to use it on Windows versions that require a signed driver. First thing I tried is to use the bundled tools, but it seems that the command line interface has a dependency on the control panel dll file. I tried a quick recompile, but then I thought, why not code my own version? The original version includes, amongst other things, the ability to load and save the ram disk as an image file and for the moment I won’t be needing that functionality. So i decided to code my own reduced functionality version of the original client. It would have been easier to just use the original client, but this was more fun and thought me a thing or two about driver communication.

The original source code was very very clear, which made it a breeze to hack together some code to talk to the driver. I still need to add way more error handling, but for now it does the job and you can use it through meterpreter. Be aware of the fact that it still leaves traces on the regular hard disk, like explained in this blog. A short overview of the traces left behind:

  • The dropped driver
  • The registry modifications to load the driver
    • The driver loading does not use a service, thus there is no evidence of a service creation
  • The mounted ram disk
  • Traces of files executed or placed on the ram disk

For me the benefits of having an easy way to execute multiple files from memory outweigh the above mentioned forensic artefacts. In addition it becomes more difficult to retrieve the original files, unless the incident response team creates a memory image or has access to a pre-installed host agent which retrieves the files from the ram disk. Let’s get practical, here is how to use it through a meterpreter session (I won’t go into details on how to obtain the meterpreter session):

Continue reading “Creating a ram disk through meterpreter”

Identify a whitelisted IP address

An IP whitelist is one of the many measures applied to protect services, hosts and networks from attackers. It only allows those that are on the IP whitelist to access the protected resources and all others are denied by default. As attackers we have multiple obstacles to overcome if we want to bypass this and not always will it be possible. In my personal opinion there are two situation in which you will end up as an attacker:

  1. You are NOT on the same network as your target
  2. You are on the same network as your target

In the first situation you will (generally speaking) not be able to access or influence the network traffic of your target. This in turn enables the TCP/IP mechanisms to be useful and prevent you from accessing the resources, although maybe not prevent you from discovering who is on the whitelist.

In the second situation you will (generally speaking) be able to access or influence the network traffic of your target. This enables us as attacker to identify as well as bypass IP restrictions, by manipulating the TCP/IP protection mechanisms, to gain access to the protected resources.

For both situations there is an often overlooked detail which is: how do you know which IPs are on the whitelist? Mostly it is just assumed that either you know that upfront or discover that due to a connection being active while you initiate your attack. In this blog posts we’ll discuss the two situations and describe the techniques available to identify IPs on whitelist which have no active connection. A small helper script can be found here.

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YARA for pentesters

YARA is a pattern matching swiss army knife often used by malware researchers. The strength of YARA is to quickly and easily identify files based on rules which are mostly aimed at identifying byte patterns. This aides malware researches, threat intelligence and forensic investigators to identify malware samples.

We can of course use the same approach to identify files containing juicy information which like always will hopefully aid us to pwn some network somewhere. Most of the files that we use like ntds.dit/registry hives reside at fixed location or at the bare minimum at configurable locations. This usually causes us to write pretty awesome scripts to retrieve and process these files to get the juicy info. YARA can be a nice tool to account for the unexpected events of system administrators placing these and many other files in unexpected locations.

To start with the end result, let’s see the results of searching for file with passwords (loosely used to also identify hashes) inside a directory:

sudo yara -r -t hashed_passwords juicy_files.txt /etc
shadow_file /etc/shadow
shadow_file /etc/shadow-

and if we do this inside a directory which contains some test files:

yara -r -t hashed_passwords juicy_files.txt files
shadow_file files/shadow
hive_file files/mysecurity
hive_file files/mysam
hive_file files/system
ntds_file files/ntds.dit
hive_file files/mysystem

Like you can imagine you can use this approach to search entire filesystems at once as well as network shares. Since the rules are very powerful and easy to write I think it’s much easier to maintain a repository of rules instead of custom scripts for each juicy file that we encounter during our pwnage. You can find the repository over here, feel free to commit more rules :)

attacking encrypted systems with qemu and volatility

Lately I’ve had to deal with setups which had transparent full disk encryption and were pretty hardened. If you are wondering what ‘transparent full disk encryption’  means, that’s how I call solutions that encrypt your hard disk, but don’t require any interaction from the user to boot into the operating system. They usually accomplish this because they:

  • use secure boot and a TPM with key sealing (good)
  • they use proprietary software-only obfuscation to hide the key (bad)
  • use an external hardware device to store the keys without secure boot or key sealing (bad)

Most of the time the goal is to break out of a preconfigured application and the usual tricks like these ones, don’t really work:

However getting access to safe mode / start up repair does partially work for some of these setups:

Partially, because most of the options were not present and those that were present only gave me a cmd.exe which was disabled with a local group policy. An interesting approach the defence side took was replacing explorer.exe with an executable which did nothing. Even if you managed to break out of their application you still had nothing, no desktop, no menu, no buttons etc. For a few setups where the ‘startup-repair’ options seemed to work the encryption drivers did not load, resulting in an environment with no access to the target disk. In case you were wondering about network attacks, those were a no go as well, since the firewalls were strictly configured for ingress and egress traffic, based on ip/port/application and yes the connection themselves used TLS with client certificates and not vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.

Usually when I encounter these environment it still is possible to perform a variety of Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks using tools like inception or pcileech. In these cases however this was physically not possible, either because there were no DMA ports available or just because I didn’t have the correct hardware with me to perform the attacks.

A common issues with all those setups however was the fact that the disk encryption software did not seal the encryption keys to a hardware security device like a TPM. This enables an attacker to create an image from the hard disk and boot this image on another computer. If the attacker also got a hold of the enclosure (USB key, smart card, obfuscated algorithm, unencrypted partition) holding the encryption keys it becomes possible to boot the disk image and fully control the victim disk in an untrusted environment.

In this blog article we are going to have a look at some of the things that you can do when you can boot a disk image of an otherwise unpenetrable environment. Please keep in mind that in part we are reinventing the wheel for two reasons:

  • Learning the nitty gritty details
  • Having a portable and understandable solution

There are solutions available that probably would enable you to achieve the same result, but for my personal taste I prefer to have something much more lightweight that can be easily ported between QEMU versions. Additionally you could also achieve the same result with the quick & dirty approach of booting the image in VMWare, pausing the machine, editing the memory file, resuming the machine. However I prefer QEMU since it allows full control over the entire process, due to the build in GDB server as well as customising the inner workings by editing/adding code and recompiling it. The following existing projects already wrap QEMU with cool and handy features if you want to use these type of setups to analyse malware or other applications:

Enough introduction of what we are going to do, let’s dive in and start elevating our shells to SYSTEM ;)
Continue reading “attacking encrypted systems with qemu and volatility”

Understanding & practicing java deserialization exploits

A good periodic reminder when attempting to learn things is that reading about the subject is not the same as actually practicing the subject you read about. That is why it’s always a good thing to practice what you have read. In this case we are going to dive into the well known Java deserialization bugs that have been around for a while now. The best part of practicing it is that you get to really know the subject at hand and can attempt to improve upon it for your own needs. For this blog post we are going to attempt the following:

  1. Exploit a deserialization bug
  2. Manually create our payload

So to clarify, step one will be about practicing the exploitation of a serialization bug with current tools as well as explaining the approach taken. The second step zooms in on the payload; what exactly is the payload? How can we construct it by hand? With the end result of fully understanding how it works as well as having an approach to understand similar bugs in the future.

I’ll mention all tools used throughout the blog post, but at the very least you’ll need the following:

That is the bug we will be exploiting. The reason for choosing a simulated bug is the fact that we can control all aspects of it and thus better understand how a deserialization exploit really works.

Continue reading “Understanding & practicing java deserialization exploits”

Brute forcing encrypted web login forms

There are a ton of ways to brute force login forms, you just need to google for it and the first couple of hits will usually do it. That is of course unless you have Burp in which case it will be sufficient for most of the forms out there. Sometimes however it will not be so straight forward and you’ll need to write your own tool(s) for it. This can be for a variety of reasons, but usually it boils down to either a custom protocol over HTTP(S) or some custom encryption of the data entered. In this post we are going to look at two ways of writing these tools:

  • Your own python script
  • A Greasemonkey script

Since to write both tools you first need to understand and analyse the non-default login form let’s do the analysis part first. If you want to follow along you’ll need the following tools:

  • Python
  • Burp free edition
  • Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin
  • FoxyProxy
  • FireFox developer tools (F12)

Please note that even though we are using some commercially available software as an example, this is NOT a vulnerability in the software itself. Most login forms can be brute forced, some forms slower than others ;) As usual you can also skip the blog post and directly download the python script & the Greasemonkey script. Please keep in mind that they might need to be adjusted for your own needs.

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Quantum Insert: bypassing IP restrictions

By now everyone has probably heard of Quantum Insert NSA style, if you haven’t then I’d recommend to check out some articles at the end of this post. For those who have been around for a while the technique is not new of course and there have been multiple tools in the past that implemented this type of attack. The tools enabled you to for example fully hijack a telnet connection to insert your own commands, terminate existing connections or just generally mess around with the connection. Most of the tools relied on the fact that they could intercept traffic on the local network and then forge the TCP/IP sequence numbers (long gone are the days that you could just predict them).

So it seems this type of attack, in which knowing the sequences numbers aids in forging a spoofed packet, has been used in two very specific manners:

  • Old Skool on local networks to inject into TCP streams
  • NSA style by globally monitoring connections and injecting packets

There is a third option however that hasn’t been explored yet as far as i know, which is using this technique to bypass IP filters for bi-directional communication. You might wonder when this might come in handy right? After all most of the attackers are used to either directly exfiltrate through HTTPS or in a worst case scenario fall back to good old DNS. These methods however don’t cover some of the more isolated hosts that you sometimes encounter during an assignment.

During a couple of assignments I encountered multiple hosts which were shielded by a network firewall only allowing certain IP addresses to or from the box. The following diagram depicts the situation:

As you can see in the above diagram, for some reason the owner of the box had decided that communication with internet was needed, but only to certain IP addresses. This got me thinking on how I could exfiltrate information. The easiest way was of course to exfiltrate the information in the same way that I had obtained access to the box, which was through SSH and password reuse. I didn’t identify any other methods of exfiltration during the assignment. This was of course not the most ideal way out, since it required passing the information through multiple infected hops in the network which could attract some attention from the people in charge of defending the network.

A more elegant way in my opinion would have been to directly exfiltrate from the machine itself and avoid having a continuous connection to the machine from within the network. In this post we are going to explore the solution I found for this challenge, which is to repurpose the well known quantum insert technique to attempt and build a bi-directional communication channel with spoofed IP addresses to be able to exfiltrate from these type of isolated hosts. If you are thinking ‘this only works if IP filtering or anti address spoofing is not enforced’ then you are right. So besides the on going DDOS attacks, this is yet another reason to block outgoing spoofed packets.

If you are already familiar with IP spoofing, forging packets and quantum insert you can also skip the rest of this post and jump directly to QIBA – A quantum insert backdoor POC. Please be aware that I only tested this in a lab setup, no guarantees on real world usage :)

Lastly as you are probably used to by now, the code illustrates the concept and proofs it works, but it’s nowhere near ready for production usage.

Continue reading “Quantum Insert: bypassing IP restrictions”

Repurposing the HP audio key logger

The last couple of days there has been some fuzz about the HP audio key logger as disclosed by modzero in their blog post and the detailed advisory that they released. The following sentence in their advisory peeked my interest:

This type of debugging turns the audio driver effectively into a keylogging spyware.

With all the hyped ‘repurposing’ of tools that is going on lately I wondered how difficult it actually is to turn this into an intended piece of malware. The reason I find this interesting is because according to different sources it’s legitimate software which has been code-signed correctly and has not been classified as malware by all anti-virus solutions, yet.

https://www.virustotal.com/nl/file/e882149c43976dfadb2746eb2d75a73f0be5aa193623b18b50827f43cce3ed84/analysis/

https://www.virustotal.com/nl/file/c046c7f364b42388bb392874129da555d9c688dced3ac1d6a1c6b01df29ea7a8/analysis/

The current detection signatures are also pretty weak since they deem it mostly ‘riskware’  or ‘potentially unwanted application (PUA)’. This could have the side effect that users or administrators might just dismiss any warnings of signs of an attacker abusing the HP audio key logger for malicious purposes.

For red team purposes this is still a nice addition, since it pushes the person analysing this potential incident to really understand what is going on and figuring out that legitimate software is being abused for malicious purposes. Specially since the binary will not be modified and thus the code-signing remains valid (until the certificate is revoked).

Let’s dive into the technical details on the path / approach I followed on repurposing this piece of legitimate software for nefarious red team purposes ;)

Continue reading “Repurposing the HP audio key logger”

Win10 secure boot inside vmware fusion

Quick blog to remind myself what the correct combination of options are to run Windows 10 Pro x64 with secure boot enabled within VMWare Fusion. Couple of reason why you’d want to do this:

  • Avoid a secondary dedicated laptop
    • Avoid having a physical TPM chip
  • Get familiar with Hyper-V
  • Better understand and research secure boot
  • Get more familiar with memory analysis on hypervisor memory
  • Just for fun

Fusion settings

  • Enable EFI by adding the following to the ‘.vmx’ file
    • firmware = “efi”
  • Enable VT-x/EPT
    • can be found in setting under “Processors & Memory”, “advanced settings”
  • Choose OS type “Hyper-V (unsupported)”

Windows 10 Pro x64 (host) settings

  • Right click on the windows start menu icon and select
    • Programs and Features
      • Turn Windows features on or off
    • Select the Hyper-V role
  • Using the Hyper-V Manager create a “Generation 2” VM
    • In Settings -> Security check the “Enable Trusted Platform Module” checkbox
  • When booting hold down a key or it won’t detect the installation ISO

Windows 10 Pro x64 (guest) settings

  • Right click on the C drive and select “Enable bitlocker”
  • Add a second hard disk and create a folder on it to save the bitlocker recovery key

References