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)

Persistence via Empire

Empire has a lot of inbuilt modules that allow us to use persistence on a system while performing a red team activity. These modules are divided into four main areas:

  • PowerBreach: This is a series of in-memory PowerShell backdoors that provide triggers for various options
  • userland: These are backdoors that execute on reboot without needing admin rights
  • elevated: These are backdoors that execute on reboot with admin rights
  • debugger triggers: These are backdoors that execute on a particular trigger (an example of this is sticky keys)

In this section, we will cover some of the modules for Linux, Windows, and macOS systems.

For Windows:

Assuming we have an agent connected on our empire from a Windows Machine:

To view a list of available persistence modules, we interact with agents using the interact <agent name> command.

Next, to view the available...