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)

Cobalt Strike payloads

Cobalt Strike supports a lot of different types of attacks and allows you to generate payloads easily from the menu. This is a very useful feature when performing a red team activity because it means you don't have to spend time switching between tools to create different payloads for different attack types, such as spear phishing or drive-bys. In this section, we will look at some of the attack types that are provided by Cobalt Strike and how to generate a payload with them.

To view the different types of payloads that we can generate from Cobalt Strike, click on Attacks from the menu, as shown in the following screenshot:

Cobalt Strike supports payload generation for three types of attack vectors: Packages, Web Drive-Bys, and Spear Phishing. Each of these are explained in more detail below

Packages:

  • HTML Application: This generates an HTML application...