Tag: red team

Old skool tales on initial access

Recently when talking to some friends, who are still enjoying the art of breaking in by being part of a red team, I was reminded by them how much more difficult initial access has gotten. I decided to write up some old stories in a bit more detail and well; admit that when companies implement advice and do stuff, cyber does have an impact.

If you are interested in similar blogs about how ‘easy’ things used to be, feel free to read this and this. Anyhow, enjoy the (hopefully) short stories. Oh and well euhm some might not be strictly about initial acces, after all we are pretending we are the bad guys right? So why not go directly for the objectives, even if that breaks some kill chains ;)

Thing that I liked the most about initial access, was mostly thinking about the true objective of the assignment. Since this determined if phishing was the most appropriate way to get there or not.

And as always with these stories, I’ve mixed up some details, so they are not exact replicas of the events to protect stuff. Many thanks to all my team members from back then, we had such a blast when brainstorming on yet another approach to get that first initial access.

  1. 0days, since they are all the hype
  2. Slowly does it, no need to hurry
  3. Typosquatting email catch-all pays off
  4. Pivoting of their-ish website
  5. iPads are for executives and curious people
Continue reading “Old skool tales on initial access”

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.

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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”