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)

Pivoting through Cobalt Strike

We have already covered the different ways of pivoting and why this is necessary in Chapter 6, Pivoting. In this section, we will look at the ways we can pivot into a network using Cobalt Strike.

Cobalt Strike allows us to pivot in three ways:

  • SOCKS Server
  • Listener
  • Deploy VPN

The preceding pivot can be explained as follows:

  • SOCKS Server: This will create a SOCKS4 proxy on our team server. All the connections that go through this SOCKS proxy will be converted into tasks for the beacon to execute. This allows us to tunnel inside the network through any type of beacon. To set up a SOCKS Server, we right-click the host, choose Pivoting | SOCKS Server, shown as follows:

A new window will then open, asking for the port number on which we want the server to be started. We enter the port and click on the Launch button:

Once the server is started, we...