redteaming – Page 2

Command and Control Using Active Directory

Published August 15, 2016 by harmj0y

‘Exotic’ command and control (C2) channels always interest me. As defenses start to get more sophisticated, standard channels that have been stealthy before (like DNS) may start to lose their efficacy. I’m always on the lookout for non-obvious, one-way (or ideally two-way) communication methods. This post will cover a proof of concept for an internal C2 approach that uses standard Active Directory object properties in a default domain setup. Active Directory Property Sets This dawned on me when reviewing access control list entry information during training prep. In a default domain setup, there is a set of ACLs for user objects that apply to the user itself, defined…

KeeThief – A Case Study in Attacking KeePass Part 2

Published July 11, 2016 by harmj0y

Note: this post and code were co-written with my fellow ATD workmate Lee Christensen (@tifkin_) who developed several of the interesting components of the project. The other week I published the “A Case Study in Attacking KeePass” post detailing a few notes on how to operationally “attack” KeePass installations. This generated an unexpected amount of responses, most good, but a few negative and dismissive. Some comments centered around the mentality of “if an attacker has code execution on your system you’re screwed already so who cares“. Our counterpoint to this is that protecting your computer from malicious compromise is a very…

A Case Study in Attacking KeePass

Published June 30, 2016 by harmj0y

[Edit 7/1/16] I wanted to make a few clarifying notes as there have been some questions surrounding this writeup: You only need administrative rights to execute any WMI subscriptions and/or gather files from user folders NOT normally accessible from the current user context (not everything described here needs admin rights). KeePass is not “bad” or “vulnerable” – it’s a much better solution than what we see deployed in most environments. However admins/companies sometimes tend to see solutions like this as some silver bullet, so one point of this post is to show that practical attack vectors against it are not unrealistic. This writeup does not cover…

Where My Admins At? (GPO Edition)

Published June 14, 2016 by harmj0y

[Edit 6/14/16] I was mistaken on a few points in the Local Account Management – Restricted Groups section, which I have now corrected. Thanks to @DougSec for the question/catch. Enumerating the membership of the Administrators local group on various computers is something we do on most of our engagements. This post will cover how to do this with Group Policy Object (GPO) correlation and without sending packets to every machine we’re enumerating these memberships for. I touched on this briefly in the Tracking Local Administrators by Group Policy Objects section of my “Local Group Enumeration” post back in March, but with a number of recent bug fixes…

Running LAPS with PowerView

Published April 26, 2016 by harmj0y

A year ago, Microsoft released the Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) which aims to prevent the reuse of local administrator passwords by setting, “…a different, random password for the common local administrator account on every computer in the domain.” This post will cover a brief background on LAPS and how to use PowerView to perform some specific LAPS-specific enumeration. Sean Metcalf has a detailed post about LAPS here with much more information for anyone interested. Note: this functionality is in the dev branch of PowerSploit. LAPS Overview LAPS accomplishes its approach by first extending the Active Directory schema to include two new fields, ms-MCS-AdmPwd (the password itself) and ms-MCS-AdmPwdExpirationTime (when the password expires).…

Abusing GPO Permissions

Published March 17, 2016 by harmj0y

A friend (@piffd0s) recently ran into a specific situation I hadn’t encountered before: the domain controllers and domain admins of the environment he was assessing were extremely locked down, but he was able to determine that a few users had edit rights on a few specific group policy objects (GPOs). After a bit of back and forth, he was able to abuse this to take down his target, and we were able to integrate some new functionality into PowerView that facilitates this process. This post will cover these new features and demonstrate how to enumerate and abuse misconfigured GPOs in case you encounter…

Local Group Enumeration

Published March 9, 2016 by harmj0y

I’ve found that one of the most useful features of PowerView (outside of its user hunting capabilities) is its ability to enumerate local group membership on remote machines. I’ve spoken about this briefly before, and gave some details on its utilization of the ADSI WinNT Provider in the “Pass-the-Hash is Dead: Long Live Pass-the-Hash” post. My colleague @sixdub wrote an excellent post titled “Derivative Local Admin” that shows the power this functionality can give attackers, and fellow ATD member @_wald0 expanded on this with his “Automated Derivative Administrator Search” post. This functionality has been indispensable on both our pentests and longer-term red-team engagements. I wanted…

Targeted Plaintext Downgrades with PowerView

Published December 16, 2015 by harmj0y

Following my pattern of weaponizing Sean Metcalf‘s work in PowerView, I’m here with another update. Sean recently released a post titled “Dump Clear-Text Passwords for All Admins in the Domain Using Mimikatz DCSync“. He describes a legacy feature for Active Directory user accounts called ‘reversible encryption’. According to Microsoft, “This policy is required when using Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) authentication through remote access or Internet Authentication Services (IAS). It is also required when using Digest Authentication in Internet Information Services (IIS)“. There’s a bit more a detailed explanation of its workings here and here. Sean describes a cool way to set this policy…

Sheets on Sheets on Sheets

Published December 3, 2015 by harmj0y

After a few requests, I’ve built out a series of cheat sheets for a few of the tools I help actively develop- PowerView, PowerUp, and Empire. I hope to illustrate the full functionality available in each tool and provide a quick reference for new adopters (as well as seasoned operators). PDF versions of these will be kept in a master repository at https://github.com/HarmJ0y/CheatSheets/ under the Creative Commons v3 “Attribution” License. They are versioned in the footnotes and I will them appropriately as time goes on. Note: PowerView and PowerUp are in the process of being integrated into the PowerSploit repository. The bit.ly links in the current sheets…

Abusing Active Directory Permissions with PowerView

Published November 12, 2015 by harmj0y

One of my favorite presentations at Derbycon V was Sean Metcalf (@pyrotek3)’s talk “Red vs. Blue: Modern Active Directory Attacks & Defense“. In it, Sean had a section focused on “Sneaky AD Persistence Tricks”, meaning methods “by which an attacker could persist administrative access to Active Directory after having Domain Admin level rights for 5 minutes“. I wanted to show how one of the methods covered, the abuse of AdminSDHolder and SDProp, can be facilitated with new PowerView 2.0 functionality. Note: I did not discover this attack method. I also will only give a brief background on the underlying components, as Sean has…

Category: redteaming