Free Training: Microsoft Office Offensive Tradecraft for Red Teamers
We are hosting a free training on Microsoft Office Offensive Tradecraft aimed at red teamers. Head over here for more details and for registration.
Marc Smeets
Reflecting on a Year with Fortra and Next Steps for Outflank
When we debuted OST back in 2021, we wrote a blog detailing both the product features and the rationale for investing time into this toolset. In 2022, we joined forces with Fortra and we can hardly believe it’s been over a year already. It was a big decision to go from being a small team of red teamers to becoming part of a large company, but we’re very pleased with the switch. In this reflection on the past 12 months, we want to provide an update on our mission, detail our continued dedication to OST, discuss the process of growing the Outflank community, and touch on where we’re headed next.
Read more: Reflecting on a Year with Fortra and Next Steps for Outflank
A Product Oriented Focus
One of our biggest challenges when we joined Fortra was the decision to put most of our energy into Outflank Security Tooling (OST).
Tags: cobalt strike, Development, Fortra, OST, red teaming
Our reasoning for Outflank Security Tooling
TLDR: We open up our internal toolkit commercially to other red teams. This post explains why.
Is blue catching your offensive actions? Are you relying on public or even commercial tools, but are these flagged by AV and EDR? Hesitant on investing deeply in offensive research and development? We’ve been there. But several years ago, we made the switch and started heavily investing in research. Our custom toolset was born.
Today we open up our toolset to other red teams in a new service called Outflank Security Tooling, abbreviated OST. We are super(!) excited about this. We truly think this commercial model is a win-win and will help other red teams and subsequently many organisations worldwide. You can find all the details at the product page. But there is more to be explained about why we do this,
RedELK Part 3 – Achieving operational oversight
This is part 3 of a multipart blog series on RedELK: Outflank’s open sourced tooling that acts as a red team’s SIEM and helps with overall improved oversight during red team operations.
In part 1 of this blog series I discussed the core concepts of RedELK and why you should want a tool like this. In part 2 I described a walk-through on integrating RedELK into your red teaming infrastructure. Read those blogs to get a better background understanding of RedELK.
For this blog I’ve setup and compromised a fictitious company. I use the logs from that hack to walk through various options of RedELK. It should make clear why RedELK is really helpful in gaining operational oversight during the campaign.
RedELK Part 2 – getting you up and running
This is part 2 of a multipart blog series on RedELK: Outflank’s open sourced tooling that acts as a red team’s SIEM and also helps with overall improved oversight during red team operations.
In part 1 of this blog series I have discussed the core concepts of RedELK and why you should want something like this. In this blog post I will walk you through integrating RedELK into your red teaming infrastructure. In future parts I will explain the core functionality of RedELK, and on the alarming of detection by blue teams.
Introducing RedELK – Part 1: why we need it
This multi-part blog post is about a tool we released: RedELK. In a few words you can describe it as a “Red Team’s SIEM”, although it actually does a few more things to ease the life of red teams. We released it right after our talk at BruCON 2018, and you may have already seen it at our GitHub. But until now we haven’t had the time to articulate our reasoning and give it a proper introduction.
This first part covers our reasoning. A the second part (soon to be released) we’ll dive into the technical details, explain basic usage and show you how you can benefit from using it as a red teamer.
Automated AD and Windows test lab deployments with Invoke-ADLabDeployer
We are happy to introduce Invoke-ADLabDeployment: a PowerShell project that helps you to quickly deploy a virtual test environment with Windows servers, Windows desktops, Office, Active Directory and a networking setup with multiple broadcast segments, all running on your local Hyper-V environment.
It is an in-house developed tool that we use heavily during our red teaming engagements. We use this to quickly spin-up lab environments that resemble the target environment. This way we can better develop and test our attacks, as well as investigate what artefacts we might leave behind.
We feel it is time to give back to the community and allow other red and blue teams to benefit from this. You can read more about its functionality and why we developed this below. Or you can go straight to the code and manual on our github.
Public password dumps in ELK
Passwords, passwords, passwords: end users and defenders hate them, attackers love them. Despite the recent focus on stronger authentication forms by defenders, passwords are still the predominant way to get access to systems. And due to the habit of end users reusing passwords, and the multitude of public leaks in the last few years, they serve as an important attack vector in the red teamer’s arsenal. Find accounts of target X in the many publicly available dumps, try these passwords or logical iterations of it (Summer2014! might very well be Winter2018! at a later moment) on a webmail or other externally accessible portals, and you may have got initial access to your target’s systems. Can’t find any accounts of your target in the dump? No worries, your intel and recon may give you private email addresses that very well may be sharing the password with the target’s counter parts.