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)

Automating Active Directory exploitation using the DeathStar

As explained by the creator:

"DeathStar is a Python script that uses Empire's RESTful API to automate gaining Domain Admin rights in Active Directory environments using a variety of techniques."

To run DeathStar, we need to start Empire with a RESTful API. This can be achieved with the following command:

sudo ./empire --rest --username <username to access the API> --password <password to access the API>

Once Empire starts, we'll see the following message:

The message displayed in the previous screenshots indicates that the RESTful API is running on port 1337/tcp and an API token has been allotted. There's a huge security risk if we open port 1337/tcp for everyone. To avoid this, we will create a reverse SSH tunnel to connect to...