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)

Multi-level pivoting

In a RedTeam activity, we may often find more networks which are further accessible from one of the internal systems. In our case, this was the 172.19.4.0/24 network. Multi-level pivoting occurs when we achieve further access into a different subnet. Let's look at an example of this:

In the preceding diagram, the attacker exploits the network and sets up a pivot on 192.168.0.10 to gain further visibility into the internal network. Upon doing more recon, the attacker comes across a system that has two NICs:

Once the attacker gains access to 192.168.0.11, they can then add a pivot again which will allow them access to 172.4.19.0 subnet. This is known as multi-level pivoting. The following diagram explains this:

As explained previously, we found a system in the 172.4.19.0 system which has another IP assigned to it. We exploited that system and added a...