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

Understanding COM automation on Windows

Since learning about Windows in the late 90s, I have been fascinated by the automation and binary sharing technologies that Microsoft has created. At onepoint, ActiveX was a powerful piece of technology – although it wasn't so great for security.

The technology that enables these scenarios is called COM. It's a binary interoperability technology. You can write code in C++ and the exposed functionality can then be invoked by any other technology or scripting language that supports COM. This includes languages such as C#, Python, or PowerShell, besides others.

On Windows, a lot of things are implemented as COM objects underneath the surface. HTML rendering (Internet Explorer), Word, Excel, and even the .NET runtime is a COM object. This means that if you have a language that can create and invoke methods on a COM object, you can host the .NET runtime in your own applications. Do you want to run some VBScript? Well, there...