Book Image

Offensive Shellcode from Scratch

By : Rishalin Pillay
5 (1)
Book Image

Offensive Shellcode from Scratch

5 (1)
By: Rishalin Pillay

Overview of this book

Shellcoding is a technique that is executed by many red teams and used in penetration testing and real-world attacks. Books on shellcode can be complex, and writing shellcode is perceived as a kind of "dark art." Offensive Shellcode from Scratch will help you to build a strong foundation of shellcode knowledge and enable you to use it with Linux and Windows. This book helps you to explore simple to more complex examples of shellcode that are used by real advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. You'll get to grips with the components of shellcode and understand which tools are used when building shellcode, along with the automated tools that exist to create shellcode payloads. As you advance through the chapters, you'll become well versed in assembly language and its various components, such as registers, flags, and data types. This shellcode book also teaches you about the compilers and decoders that are used when creating shellcode. Finally, the book takes you through various attacks that entail the use of shellcode in both Windows and Linux environments. By the end of this shellcode book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to understand the workings of shellcode and build your own exploits by using the concepts explored.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: Shellcode
5
Section 2: Writing Shellcode
8
Section 3: Countermeasures and Bypasses

Shellcode techniques

When it comes to shellcode development for Windows, there are a number of techniques that can be used. In this section, we will cover some of these techniques that are prevalent today. These techniques range from buffer overflow attacks to attacks leveraging pointers known as eggs, backdooring PE files, and so on.

We will get started by considering buffer overflow attacks. Let's dive into this.

Buffer overflow attacks

A buffer is a volatile location of memory. Its aim is to temporarily hold data while this is being transferred from one location to another. Since this is a temporary hold, it has limitations. These limitations are the size of the buffer, which is generally small. When you overflow the buffer, you are exceeding the capacity of the buffer. The result of the overflow can lead to malicious code being executed.

Stack-based buffer overflows are one of the most common types of exploits that exist. These are often used to take over the code...