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

Achieving objectives by automating Microsoft Office

In this section, we will look into ideas and techniques for how COM automation can be used during red teaming. In particular, the focus will be on Office applications. For simplicity and consistency, the examples in this section have been written using PowerShell. However, remember that this can be done with any language that supports COM objects.

First, let's look at Outlook and how we can send emails via the Outlook COM object during post-exploitation.

Automating sending emails via Outlook

A simple yet powerful technique to send emails without having to set up or configure a mail client is to just leverage the mail client on the host of a compromised user.

Let's say we were able to pivot on a machine and found an interesting file that we want to exfiltrate. Here is a neat PowerShell script that leverages COM automation. As I described earlier, this can be achieved with any scripting language that can leverage...