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Red Team AI Skills

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Today, SpecterOps released a new open-source skills marketplace for offensive security research and red team operations. We are proud to have collaborated on this project over the last few weeks and hope more teams will join now that it’s public. The initial release includes plugins for Fortra’s Cobalt Strike and Outflank C2. Get started here: https://github.com/SpecterOps/skills

Background

I recently reached out to a few red teams we’ve worked with before to discuss developing a public AI marketplace focused on offensive security. I was inspired by the Trail of Bits marketplace and wanted to see a similar project for offensive security. This task was too large to take on alone, so I contacted a few other researchers to discuss a joint effort. Imagine my surprise when SpecterOps told me they were nearly done implementing a similar project!

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Infrared: How External Researchers Bring Tools into OST

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In this blog, we want to do more than point at a new capability inside OST. We want to show how external researchers can bring their own tools into the platform, using InfraRED as a practical example of what that process can look like from both sides. InfraRED was created by Dominic Penn-Newman, and in this post we cover how the collaboration started, what it takes to turn a promising tool into something OST customers can rely on, and how Dominic experienced the process as the developer. Let’s go.

Why Do We Integrate External Projects Into OST?

Outflank Security Tooling (OST) is Outflank’s main product: a commercial offering designed to make life easier for red teams. OST brings together 30+ tools, a substantial knowledge base with 15k+ lines of documentation and 40+ hours of video content,

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New Mouse in the House: Zero-Point Security Training Joins the Fortra Family

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For those who don’t know me, my name is Daniel Duggan, known online as RastaMouse. I spent over a decade working as a penetration tester and red teamer across the public and private sector, before founding Zero-Point Security in 2018. My mission was to build the kind of training I wish had existed when I was coming up: practical, accessible, cost-effective, and rooted in real adversary tradecraft.

My Red Team Ops and Red Team Ops II training courses are the fruits of that labour, which are now recognised across multiple industry sectors including financial services, military, manufacturing, and naturally, security consultancies.

In 2025, Fortra and Zero-Point Security collaborated to launch a dedicated Cobalt Strike training course, giving operators a hands-on foundation in red team assessments and adversary simulations, built directly around the tool.

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Introducing Cobalt Strike Research Labs

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This is a joint blog written by Stan Hegt, Pieter Ceelen, and Will Burgess.

Today, we’re launching Cobalt Strike Research Labs (CS:RL), a new Fortra offering that unites the research expertise of the Cobalt Strike and Outflank teams. CS:RL delivers cutting-edge, ready-to-use research tooling for Cobalt Strike, including custom UDRLs, Sleep Masks, UDC2 channels, and post-exploitation capabilities. Most importantly, it provides the Cobalt Strike team with a platform to deliver experimental beta features, test ideas, and gather feedback before moving proven features into the main product.

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macOS JIT Memory

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The macOS Hardened Runtime prevents execution of unsigned code. Unsigned executables will not run, regardless of compilation settings. Processes cannot load unsigned shared libraries into apps with the Hardened Runtime. Nearly every app found on a modern system enables the Hardened Runtime, and Apple silicon processors enable memory protection for all apps. So, how does malware execute within such constraints?

  1. Valid signatures – There are a few examples of criminals signing their malware, but Apple can revoke certificates, and has done so quickly, even over the weekend.
  2. Script-based malware – Malware written in languages like Python and JavaScript for Automation (JXA) does not require a signature, though initial access delivery may be constrained.
  3. Hardened Runtime exceptions –

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Red Macros Factory Is Joining OST (And So Am I!)

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Hey everyone! I’m Mariusz Banach (mgeeky) and I’m excited to introduce myself as the newest member of the Outflank team.

For those who don’t know me, I’ve spent years in the trenches as a red teamer and have trained others to do the same, delivering public and private IT security trainings on malware analysis, initial access, evasion tactics, and more.

However, I have spent the last few years building and managing Red Macros Factory (RMF), an Initial Access Framework designed to take the pain out of the weaponization phase that kicks off every red team engagement. RMF represents three years of research-driven development, battle-tested across numerous engagements. The philosophy behind it is simple: red team tools, by a red teamer, for red teamers.

Sound familiar? That’s exactly why I’m here.

As part of joining Outflank,

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PatchGuard Peekaboo: Hiding Processes on Systems with PatchGuard in 2026

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Introduction

I spent a few weeks (and could have spent even more) trying to find a reliable trick to intercept kernel activity while HVCI was breathing down my neck. Almost every approach I tried ended the same way: either a blunt “access denied” or an instant black screen that replaced everyone’s favorite blue one.

Windows is not playing games anymore; the era of clever inline hooks and creative PatchGuard dodges is largely over. Microsoft pushed the enforcement layer up into places a normal kernel driver simply can’t touch. We’re talking hardware-enforced, hypervisor-backed protections: “you don’t even have permission to ask for permission.”

This research centers on a specific objective: hiding processes from user-mode enumeration by manipulating kernel structures – specifically, the process linked lists that Windows uses to track active processes.

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Linux Process Injection via Seccomp Notifier

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This post demonstrates the use of seccomp user notifications to inject a shared library into a Linux process. I haven’t seen this combination documented as a process injection technique before, and it has some benefits over alternatives. In summary, seccomp user notifications enable user-space injection from parent to child without any LD_* environment variables or privileged capabilities, regardless of the ptrace_scope configuration. However, seccomp user notifications have some notable limitations:

  1. Seccomp user notifications were introduced in Linux kernel version 5.0, but this PoC relies on SECCOMP_ADDFD_FLAG_SEND (Linux 5.14+) to avoid TOCTOU issues when hooking openat.
  2. Requires you to create the target process (parent-to-child injection only).
  3. The injected code runs with the same UID, namespaces, and LSM label as the target process.

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Training Specialist Models: Automating Malware Development

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This post complements the presentation I gave at Black Hat USA 2025.

Can a small, self-hosted LLM outperform state-of-the-art models at evasive malware development?
In this technical deep dive, we explore how reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enables training compact specialist models that rival large generalists in domain-specific tasks.

In the first half of this post, we’ll break down the LLM training process and recent opportunities created by RLVR. The second half details our training methodology for Dante-7B, a 7 billion parameter model that generates functional, evasive Cobalt Strike shellcode loaders capable of bypassing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE). We’ve released Dante-7B on Hugging Face, complete with a demo app so anyone can experiment with the model.

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Accelerating Offensive R&D with Large Language Models

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At Outflank, we continually seek ways to accelerate our research and development efforts without compromising quality. In this pursuit, we’ve begun integrating large language models (LLMs) into our internal research workflows. While we’re still exploring the full potential of AI-powered offensive tooling, this post highlights how we’ve already used AI to speed up the delivery of traditional offensive capabilities.

By leveraging AI as a research accelerator, we can dedicate more time to refining, testing, and hardening the techniques that ultimately make it into our OST offering. This post is a case study of our AI-assisted exploration of the “trapped COM object” bug class.

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