Book Image

Hands-On Red Team Tactics

By : Himanshu Sharma, Harpreet Singh
Book Image

Hands-On Red Team Tactics

By: Himanshu Sharma, Harpreet Singh

Overview of this book

Red Teaming is used to enhance security by performing simulated attacks on an organization in order to detect network and system vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics starts with an overview of pentesting and Red Teaming, before giving you an introduction to few of the latest pentesting tools. We will then move on to exploring Metasploit and getting to grips with Armitage. Once you have studied the fundamentals, you will learn how to use Cobalt Strike and how to set up its team server. The book introduces some common lesser known techniques for pivoting and how to pivot over SSH, before using Cobalt Strike to pivot. This comprehensive guide demonstrates advanced methods of post-exploitation using Cobalt Strike and introduces you to Command and Control (C2) servers and redirectors. All this will help you achieve persistence using beacons and data exfiltration, and will also give you the chance to run through the methodology to use Red Team activity tools such as Empire during a Red Team activity on Active Directory and Domain Controller. In addition to this, you will explore maintaining persistent access, staying untraceable, and getting reverse connections over different C2 covert channels. By the end of this book, you will have learned about advanced penetration testing tools, techniques to get reverse shells over encrypted channels, and processes for post-exploitation.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Slack notification for Empire agents

Starting with Empire and getting an agent is easy, but what if we tried to perform a mass phishing attack on the whole organization? How will we know if we got an agent alive or not? What if the agent connects back to our Empire C2 in the middle of the night and we're not online to check it?

It may not seem a serious issue, but a barrage of agents is difficult to manage. For cases like these, let's use Slack. Slack is a messaging application which allows teams to communicate. We can use Slack as the alert application to get an alert whenever an agent connects back to the Empire C2.

Let's register with Slack first by visiting https://slack.com. Once registered, open up the URL shown in the following screenshot to create a legacy API token:

An issued legacy token will look something like this:

Empire gives us the option to add...