Book Image

Cybersecurity Attacks – Red Team Strategies

By : Johann Rehberger
Book Image

Cybersecurity Attacks – Red Team Strategies

By: Johann Rehberger

Overview of this book

It's now more important than ever for organizations to be ready to detect and respond to security events and breaches. Preventive measures alone are not enough for dealing with adversaries. A well-rounded prevention, detection, and response program is required. This book will guide you through the stages of building a red team program, including strategies and homefield advantage opportunities to boost security. The book starts by guiding you through establishing, managing, and measuring a red team program, including effective ways for sharing results and findings to raise awareness. Gradually, you'll learn about progressive operations such as cryptocurrency mining, focused privacy testing, targeting telemetry, and even blue team tooling. Later, you'll discover knowledge graphs and how to build them, then become well-versed with basic to advanced techniques related to hunting for credentials, and learn to automate Microsoft Office and browsers to your advantage. Finally, you'll get to grips with protecting assets using decoys, auditing, and alerting with examples for major operating systems. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build, manage, and measure a red team program effectively and be well-versed with the fundamental operational techniques required to enhance your existing skills.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Embracing the Red
6
Section 2: Tactics and Techniques

Abusing logging and tracing to steal credentials and access tokens

For debugging and monitoring purposes, applications and services emit logs and traces. This enables privileged users on the machine to get more insights into the inner workings of an application during runtime. Windows has a powerful tracing infrastructure called Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Tracing is often a form of logging that is more technical in nature compared to functional logging. It's often used by engineers to debug the execution flow of a program or to perform performance analysis.

There are tools out of the box in Windows to interact with ETW, and they allow us to start traces, collect data, and stop them, such as wevtutil and logman.

Let's dive into a detailed example using logman, which allows us to manage event tracing sessions. Run the following command to see what providers are available:

logman query providers

This lists all the providers that can emit events. On my machine...