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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.

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This month (October 2018) our team members presented at two hacker conferences:

• The MS Office magic show at DerbyCon
• Mirror on the wall: using blue team techniques in red team ops at BruCON

Below, you can find the video recordings of these presentations.

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Persistent access to a target’s network is one of the milestones in any offensive operation. During our operations, we use various types of short-haul beacons for day-to-day operations. If all short-haul beacons fail, a long-haul beacon which calls back much less frequently, can restore access to the target’s network. As such, a long-haul beacon should function in a way that it does not attract the attention of the blue team.

TL;DR
For OPSEC reasons, it is a good habit to split your command and control (C2) between low-and-slow channels (stage 1, long-haul) and operational channels (stage 2, short-haul). This blog post provides operational details for building a stage 1 C2 channel using DNS over HTTPS (HTTPS calls to dns.google.com to retrieve DNS TXT records) to trigger the download of a stager that will subsequently launch a payload for stage 2 C2.

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At our Derbycon talk, the MS Office Magic Show, Stan and myself presented various novel techniques for abusing Excel and Word in Red Teaming operations. One of the tricks introduced was about the Sylk fileformat and Excel 4.0 / XLM macro’s. Full detailled blogs on Sylk and other discussed subjects will follow later. For now it suffices to say that we shared a 99byte Sylk file that pops Calc using XLM when the victim enables macro. As Sylk files are text files they do not open in protected mode.

TL;DR
In Office 2011 for Mac XLM Macro’s in Sylk files are auto executed (no protected mode or macro prompt). Time to say goodbye and really remove office 2011. Issue may even be triggered if you have both Office 2016 and 2011 for Mac installed.

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In this post, I will dive into Excel 4.0 macros (also called XLM macros – not XML) for offensive purposes. If you grew up in the Windows 95 age or later, just as I did, you might have never heard of this technology that was introduced as early as 1992. Virtually all malicious macro documents for MS Office are based on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). However, XLM macros are a hidden gem for red teamers and turn out to be a very good alternative to VBA macros for offensive purposes: XLM can be difficult to analyse and it appears that most antivirus solutions have trouble detecting XLM maldocs. And although the technology is 26 years old by now, Excel 4.0 macros are still supported in the most recent Microsoft Office versions (including Office 2016, at time of writing).

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Using a combination of HTML5 and JavaScript to sneak malicious files past content filters is not a new offensive technique. This mechanism has been incorporated into popular offensive frameworks such as Demiguise and SharpShooter for example. However, from our discussions and trainings with blue teams, we have learned that many defenders are not aware of this technique or its implications. In this blog post, we will explain how a few lines of JavaScript have big impact on perimeter security.

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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.

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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.

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In many of our red teaming and incident response engagements, we encounter the abuse of MS Office macros as a vector to drop a remote access trojan and thereby gain initial foothold. From many discussions with our clients we have learned that macros are hard to secure and often a necessity for business operations. In this blog I’ll share a rough approach for detection of evil macros. In parallel, we are working on a more robust solution that can fully manage the macro problem (we hope to share some news on this later).

Once discussing the subject of macro security, clients indicate that there is no insight into what office macros are being used/executed with a legit business purpose. In the majority of cases businesses leave Macro settings untouched, rendering the effective settings “macro disabled with notification”.

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DISCLAIMER: this blog post covers functionality of Cobalt Strike that is not officially supported, nor fully tested or confirmed to ever appear with the current specs as official functionality. If you want to experiment with this yourself, @armitagehacker has provided a link that will be used for future documentation.
It is however a lot of fun. It provides flexibility and allowed us to leverage the power of CS in a far from default network setup at a high secure environment. We truly hope this functionality becomes available in future releases of Cobalt Strike.

External_C2

We encountered the need for alternatives to the standard DNS, HTTP or HTTPS channels for C2 traffic We feel Mallable format allows for great C2, especially when combined with Haproxy which sends all non C2 traffic to a real site that relates to the Mallable profile used.

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