redteaming – harmj0y

Operational Guidance for Offensive User DPAPI Abuse

Published August 22, 2018 by harmj0y

I’ve spoken about DPAPI (the Data Protection Application Programming Interface) a bit before, including how KeePass uses DPAPI for its “Windows User Account” key option. I recently dove into some of the amazing work that Benjamin Delpy has done concerning DPAPI and wanted to record some operational notes on abusing DPAPI with Mimikatz. Note: I am focusing on user-based DPAPI abuse in this post, but at some point I intend to dive into abuse of the machine’s DPAPI key as well. If I am able to get my head around that particular set of abuses, I will draft a follow-up post. Another note:…

GhostPack

Published July 24, 2018 by harmj0y

Anyone who has followed myself or my teammates at SpecterOps for a while knows that we’re fairly big fans of PowerShell. I’ve been involved in offensive PowerShell for about 4 years, @mattifestation was the founder of PowerSploit and various defensive projects, @jaredcatkinson has been writing defensive PowerShell for years, and many of my teammates (@tifkin_, @enigma0x3, rvrsh3ll, @xorrior, @andrewchiles, and others) have written various security-related PowerShell projects over the past several years, totaling thousands of lines of code. By now, the reason for choosing PowerShell should be fairly self-evident; the language is Turing-complete, built into modern Windows operating systems, and…

A Guide to Attacking Domain Trusts

Published October 30, 2017 by harmj0y

It’s been a while (nearly 2 years) since I wrote a post purely on Active Directory domain trusts. After diving into group scoping, I realized a few subtle misconceptions I previously had concerning trusts and group memberships. That, combined with the changes made to PowerView last year, convinced me to publish an up-to-date guide on enumerating and attacking domain trusts. This will likely be the last post focusing on domain trusts I publish for a while, and at over 8000 words, it’s not exactly a light read (not that anyone reads long posts ;) In general, I don’t just blog my operational…

Offensive Encrypted Data Storage (DPAPI edition)

Published July 31, 2017 by harmj0y

Last September I wrote a post titled “Offensive Encrypted Data Storage” that detailed an approach to securely storing data on disk during offensive engagements. I recently revisited the idea a bit while once again thinking about disk artifacts, and remembered about DPAPI. The Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) provides a simplified set of cryptographic functions that abstracts away concerns about deriving/storing keys, and removes the need to include additional libraries to use this functionality. DPAPI uses either the user’s current logon credential or the the randomized machine account password (depending on the “scope” passed to the functions) to protect, by…

Pass-the-Hash Is Dead: Long Live LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Published March 16, 2017 by harmj0y

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post named “Pass-the-Hash is Dead: Long Live Pass-the-Hash” that detailed some operational implications of Microsoft’s KB2871997 patch. A specific sentence in the security advisory, “Changes to this feature include: prevent network logon and remote interactive logon to domain-joined machine using local accounts…” led me to believe (for the last 3 years) that the patch modified Windows 7 and Server 2008 behavior to prevent the ability to pass-the-hash with non-RID 500 local administrator accounts. My colleague Lee Christensen recently pointed out that this was actually incorrect, despite Microsoft’s wording, and that the situation is…

Offensive Encrypted Data Storage

Published September 6, 2016 by harmj0y

We generally try to keep off of disk as much as possible on engagements- there’s less to clean up and fewer chances of being caught. However, occasionally we have a need to store data on disk on a target system, and we want to try to do this in a secure way in case any incident responders start to catch on. Examples would be reboot-persistent keyloggers, something that monitors locations for specific files and clones/exfiltrates them, and the pilfering of KeePass files (see the Example: KeePass + EncryptedStore section below). If we have to write a file to disk, we…

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…

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