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)

Customizing the team server

The team server is just a bash script that executes the cobaltstrike.jar file for starting the server. By default, the Armitage team server runs on port 55553/tcp and the Cobalt Strike team server runs on port 50050/tcp (both use SSL for communication initiation). Being the default port, it's easy for someone else to find your team server on the internet and try to connect to it in order to get access to your compromised hosts. Consequently, to protect your team server from attacks, you need to think of a few ways to protect it from other attackers. These may include the following:

  • Use a strong password for team server authentication [EASY]
  • Whitelist your IP from the team server firewall and deny all other IPs (this could be messy if your IP is dynamic) [MEDIUM]
  • Block the 55553/tcp port from the firewall on the team server and tunnel this port...