7 Minute Security

Today we continue our series focused on building a security consultancy and talk about: A phishing campaign that went off the rails, and lessons learned from it First impressions of an awesome tool to help add MFA to your Active Directory (not a sponsor) A tangent story about how my wife brought some thieves to justice!

Hey friends! Today I've got some exciting personal/professional news to share: our Light Pentest eBook - which is a practical, step-by-step playbook for internal network penetration testing - is now available for purchase! Note: this eBook and the Light Pentest LITE training are two separate things, but do cover some of the same topics. The Light Pentest eBook covers: Grabbing and analyzing packet captures Abusing insecure network protocols Exploiting (the lack of) SMB signing Capturing, cracking and passing hashes Locating high-value targets with DNS zone transfers Exploiting vulnerable Group Policy Objects Scraping screenshots of Web interfaces with WitnessMe Finding and cracking "Kerberoastable" and "ASREPRoastable" Active Directory accounts Dumping, passing and cracking hashes from domain controllers The Light Pentest eBook is available now for $7.77, and by purchasing it you are entitled to all future editions/revisions going forward.

Today our good buddy Joe Skeen and I virtually sit down with Matt Quammen of Blue Team Alpha to talk about all things incident response! Topics covered include: Top 5 things to do and not do during ransomware event Challenges when responding to ransomware events Opportunities to break into infosec/IR The value of tabletop exercises, and some great ideas for conducting your own Incident response stress and success stories Cyber insurance - worth it or not?

Today our friend Christopher Fielder from Arctic Wolf is back for an interview four-peat! We had a great chat about making sense of vendor alphabet soup terms (like SIEM, SOC, EDR/MDR/XDR, ML, AI and more!), optimizing your SOC to "see" as much as possible, tackling vendor/customer communication problems, and simplifying security product pricing to make purchases less stressful for customers! And don't forget to check out Christopher's first, second and third interviews with 7MS.

Today we're continuing our series called Desperately Seeking a Super SIEM for SMBs - this time with a focus on a new contender in our bake-off: Perch Security! It might help you to go back and take in part 1 and part 2, but today we're focusing on the first experience I had chatting with the sales/technical folks at Perch. TLDL: I really liked a lot of things I was hearing and seeing. Pros (perceived) include: Simple pricing model Easy to use dashboard Cool "marketplace" of integrations you can add to your instance and start getting alerts for Nice API integration that seemed pretty simple to use - and that covers a lot of different cloud products and services Ticket dashboard looked straightfoward to use and interpret Can quickly add IPs/subnets that you don't want to monitor, if appropriate

Today we continue our series we started recently (part 1 is here about finding a super SIEM for SMBs. Specifically I have some updates on (and frustrations with) Arctic Wolf, Elastic, Milton Security and Perch Security. Here's the TLDL version: Arctic Wolf They remain a strong contender in my bake-offs. They also could tick several boxes for an org as they offer continuous internal/external vulnerability scanning as well as a managed SOC. (And yes, I'm probably a tiny bit biased because I know a bunch of AWN's engineers and like the product) Elastic I've loved my interactions with the sales folks and engineers at Elastic. My initial trial had some technical speed bumps (which Elastic helped me remedy). I eventually did get some Elastic agents enrolled on endpoints in my lab. However, now that I'm up and running (and admittedly I should go through the Webinars and online training), I'm feeling overwhelmed. There's a jillion menus and submenus to explore. I feel like I've been given a high-performance sports ca

Today we're continuing our discussion on phishing campaigns - including a technical "gotcha" that might redirect your phishing emails into a digital black hole if you're not careful! As I mentioned last week, I've been heavy into spinning up and tearing down phishing campaigns, so I finally got around to documenting everything in episode 481. This week I ran into a bizarre issue where test phishes to myself suddenly disappeared from my Outlook altogether! After chatting with some folks on Slack I did a message trace in the Exchange Admin Center under: Mail flow > Message Trace > Start a trace then make the Sender field be the user you're sending phishing emails from. That showed me that my phishes were being quarantined! To get around the quarantine, I went into Mail flow > Rules and then created a new rule with the following properties: Apply this rule if > The sender's domain is > yourphishingdomain.com Then under Do the following: Set the spam confidence level (SCL) to...Bypass spam filtering Under A

Today we're revisiting how to make a kick-butt cred-capturing phishing campaign with Gophish, Amazon Lightsail, LetsEncrypt, ExpiredDomains.net and a special little extra something that makes creating phishing landing pages waaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy easier! For some quicker review, you can check out part 1 and also the complementary YouTube video, but I wanted to revisit this kick-butt process and update a few items: First, this SingleFile extension is amaaaaaaaazing for making phishing landing pages with ease! The process to get GApps to let you generate an app-specific password for using with GoPhish is kinda annoying. The steps below should get you going: After domain registration, log into admin.google.com or click Manage Workspace button at checkout. At the next screen click Workspace Admin Console. Sign in with the person you’ll be spoofing from, and the temporary password emailed to your backup email account during checkout. In the search bar search for Less Secure Apps, choose Allow users to manage the

Today we're talking about the SIEM bake-off for SMBs that we've recently embarked on. We're currently evaluating several solutions - either for customer-facing purposes, internal kick-the-tires fun, or both. Candiates include: Arctic Wolf Elastic Milton Security Protocol46 Sumo Logic First we're starting by running each vendor through a series of questions, then likely following up with a demo where we'll run some technical tests and simulated hacking to see which vendor or vendors reign supreme!

Hey friends, today we're talking about a new security training offering 7MinSec has created called Light Pentest LITE - Live Interactive Training Experience. It's a 3-day course (with each class session being 3 hours long) consisting of live (via Zoom), hands-on, instructor-led sessions that are focused on teaching you how to find, exploit and defend against common Active Directory weaknesses! Check out today's episode to learn more and get a hint for an OSINT exercise that will get you 10% off of a Light Pentest LITE training session!

Hey friends, today we're continuing our discussion of password cracking by sharing some methodology that has helped us get a high cred yield, and some tips on taking cracked passwords from multiple sources and Frankensteining them into a beautiful report for your customer. For some background, when 7MS started as a biz, we used to crack passwords in Paperspace but invested in an on-prem cracking rig a few years ago. That rig has been flipping sweet, but had some heating issues which prompted me to send the system in for warranty and use an awesome cracking rig in AWS in the meantime. Whether you're cracking locally or in the cloud, here's a quick methodology that has cracked many a hash for us: Do a straight-up hashcat crack against the PwnedPasswords list (at time of this writing I don't have a good source for the cracked versions of these passwords. I used to grab them at hashes.org. Anybody got an alternative? Do a straight-up hashcat crack through the RockYou2021 list Run the hatecrack methodology,

Today we're talking about Cobalt Strike for newbs - including how to get it up and running, as well as some tools that will help you generate beacons while evading EDR at the same time! Some helpful things mentioned in today's episode: Wherever you spin up your CS instance, it's probably a good idea to lock down the firewall to only specific IPs. With Digital Ocean, I found this article helpful. When generating CS listeners, the C2Concealer from FortyNorth helped me get malleable C2 profiles generated while creating a LetsEncrypt cert at the same time! My CS beacons kept getting gobbled by AV, but the following resources helped me get some stealthy ones generated: Artifact Kit, PEzor and ScareCrow. Here's a specific ScareCrow example that flew under the EDR radar: Scarecrow -I myrawshellcode.bin -etw -domain www.microsoft.com PowerUpSQL is awesome for finding servers where you can run stored procedures to send your attacking box a priv'd hash to pass/capture/crack. Check out this presentation on Pow

**STOP!** If you didn't listen to [last week's episode](https://7ms.us/7ms-475-tales-of-internal-network-pentest-pwnage-part-27/) you might want to, since this was a two-part tale of pwnage. Either way I'll get you up to speed and talk about why this was (of course) one of my favorite pentests ever.

Yeahhhhhh! Today's another fun tale of pentest pwnage, including: The importance of starting your pentest with an AD account that actually has access to...ya know...stuff The importance of starting your pentest plugged into a network that actually has...you know...systems connected to it! This BHIS article is awesome for finding treasures in SMB shares PowerUpSQL audits are a powerful way to get pwnage on a pentest - check out this presentation for some practical how-to advice IPMI/BMCs often have weak creds and/or auth bypasses so don't forget to check for them. Rapid7 has a slick blog on the topic. Don't forget to check for vulnerable VMWare versions because some of them have major vulnerabilities

Hey friends! Today we're dusting off an old mini-series about password cracking in the cloud (check out part 1 and part 2) and sharing some awesome info on building a monster of a cracking rig in AWS! One reason we haven't talked about password cracking in the cloud in a while is because back in winter of 2019 I built baby's first password cracking. Unfortunately, this week, Hashy (the name I gave to the rig) is overheating, and GPUs are impossible to find, so what's a pentester to do? Well, in today's episode I talk about this article from Sevnx which walks you through building a virtual password-cracking beast in the cloud. The article (complemented by a sweet video) will get you running in short order. WARNING: running this instance is super expensive (the author warns the instance would cost ~$9k/month if you left it run continuously). The steps are pretty straightforward, but between reboots I found that hashcat acted all wonky. Luckily, the article addresses that with this great tip: Pro tip: Save the

Hey everybody! Today Joe and I sat down with Nikhil Mittal of Pentester Academy and Altered Security to talk about a whole slew of fun security topics: How Nikhil first got involved in Pentester Academy Nikhil's hacker origin story How does Nikhil feel about his tools being used by baddies? What security tools/defenses would be good for SMBs to focus on? Active Directory security - is all hope lost? Will AI, ML, Terminator robots, etc. replace all of us who do pentesting for a living?

Today our good pal Christopher Fielder from Arctic Wolf is back for an interview three-peat! He joins Joe "The Machine" Skeen (a.k.a. Gh0sthax) and I to talk about all things ransomware, including: How the Colonial Pipeline incident may have started from a weak VPN cred with no MFA. Silver lining (?) - they got some of the $ back. Was the federal government's response good enough? What should the government be doing to better handle and manage ransomware? Common ways ransomware gets in our environments, and some ways to NOT get ransomware'd: Use 2FA (make sure that all accounts are using it!) Consider having (if possible) your AD user scheme be something like chi-user4920394 instead of Joe.President Have users that haven't logged in for X days get automatically locked out Train your users - consider Arctic Wolf's managed security awareness offering Detect early signs of compromise like Kerberoasting Lock down your DNS egress to only specific servers so that it doesn't run "wide open" Leverage good thr

Hey everybody, happy June! Our pal Joe is back to cover some great security stories with us, including: Peloton's leaky API Some Colonial Pipeline discussion (story 1, story 2) Amazon Sidewalk doesn't really share your Internet connection with neighbors/strangers. The Hacker News article doesn't do an awesome job of clearing that up either.  

Today we're doing something new - a first impressions episode of Meraki networking gear. Note: this is not a sponsored episode, but rather a follow up to episode #460 where I talked about throwing all my UniFi gear into the ocean and replacing it with Meraki gear. At the end of that episode I asked if anybody was interested in a "first impressions" of the gear, and it turns out (at least 6) people are interested, so here we are! TLDL: Pros Super easy plug-and-play setup The mobile app can control just about everything - ports, SSIDs, Internet on/off timers and more! Verbose logging Top-notch support from experienced technicians Cons Cost! Big $$$ "Cloud only" - can't install this gear in a LAN-only configuration Client VPN is a bit clunky to setup

Hey friends! Today we're talking with Philippe Humeau, CEO of CrowdSec, which is "an open-source massively multiplayer firewall able to analyze visitor behavior & provide an adapted response to all kinds of attacks. It also leverages the crowd power to generate a global IP reputation database to protect the user network." I came into this interview not knowing much at all about CrowdSec, so I peppered Philippe with questions such as: What is CrowdSec? What problem does it solve? Who are your competitors? You're open source...so how do you make $? What's your five-year plan? You're dealing with a lot of data and metrics...how are you handling data privacy laws and concerns such as GDPR? What if I fall in love with CrowdSec and want to contribute to making it better? It was a really fun, transparent and energetic interview - hope you enjoy it!