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

Performing password spray attacks

A different approach to get some valid credentials is by attempting to authenticate and explore if credentials are valid. This, of course, is noisy, but surprisingly it is frequently not detected.

These are a set of common protocols that an adversary might password spray against:

  • LDAP
  • RDP, WinRM, and SSH
  • WMI/SMB
  • Database systems
  • Web applications

Most organizations also expose web applications that authenticate users. Those can be useful for password spraying too.

Performing password spraying on external endpoints might allow an adversary to identify accounts with weak passwords that are not enrolled in MFA. After successfully guessing the password, they can either directly log in or enroll the compromised account themselves for MFA. Subsequently, an adversary might be able to fully gain access to corporate infrastructure. This is a common tactic that has to be tested for and mitigated for your organization. Passwords...