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

Clear text credentials and how to find them

Clear text credentials (especially passwords) are commonly found in insecure locations – too common, unfortunately. They can be found in expected and unexpected places. Organizations across the board struggle to solve this challenge. Some of the obvious places to look for are file shares, the local filesystems of compromised machines, source code repositories, the command-line history, and so on.

Inspecting the history of check-ins can sometimes also uncover some unexpected results as developers remove clear text credentials form source code, but, at the same time, they do not rotate the secret. Rotating means to update the leaked secret to a new one, such as resetting your password. Hence, old passwords that got deleted from source control might still be valid.

This is something employees need help with, so keep them honest. Everyone, at times, is under pressure to ship features and may accidently (or non-accidentally) not...