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

Exploiting the default credentials of local admin accounts

Organizations often face challenges regarding how to manage a large fleet of machines at scale. This becomes especially tricky in heterogeneous environments. Besides Active Directory and group policies, systems such as Chef are used to configure and manage the fleet.

Important Note

One thing to look for is the existence of additional users on regular corporate laptops, especially administrative accounts.

This is something I have seen a couple of times. Basically, there's a common root user (or Administrator account) that IT provisions and uses to troubleshoot or manage the device. If it's the same password across the organization, it's of importance for the red teamers to get that password as it provides the Domain Administrator equivalent.

An adversary might try to brute-force it, and subsequently have the password to log in to any workstation! Alternatively, the password may be stored in a local...