Cobalt Strike and Outflank Security Tooling: Friends in Evasive Places

This is a joint blog written by the Cobalt Strike and Outflank teams. It is also available on the Cobalt Strike site.

Over the past few months there has been increasing collaboration and knowledge sharing internally between the Cobalt Strike and Outflank R&D teams. We are excited about the innovation opportunities made possible by this teamwork and have decided to align Cobalt Strike and Outflank Security Tooling (OST) closely going forward. Although we are actively collaborating, Cobalt Strike will continue to be the industry standard Command & Control (C2) framework, while OST will continue to offer a red team toolbox for all environments containing custom tradecraft that is OPSEC safe, evasive by design, and simple to use. Our vision is that Cobalt Strike and OST together will provide the best red team offering on the planet. 

Tags: , , , , , ,

Read full post

So you think you can block Macros?

For the purpose of securing Microsoft Office installs we see many of our customers moving to a macro signing strategy. Furthermore, Microsoft is trying to battle macro malware by enforcing Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) control on macro-enabled documents. In this blog we will dive into some of the quirks of Microsoft Office macro security, various commonly used configuration options and their bypasses.

  • In the first part of the blog we will discuss various Microsoft Office security controls on macros and add-ins, including their subtleties, pitfalls and offensive bypasses.
  • In the second part of this blog the concept of LOLdocs is further explained, detailing how vulnerabilities in signed MS Office content might be abused to bypass even strictly configured MS Office installs.

This blog is related to our BruCON talk on LOLdocs: legitimately signed Office documents where control flows can be hijacked for malicious purposes.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Read full post

Attacking Visual Studio for Initial Access

In this blog post we will demonstrate how compiling, reverse engineering or even just viewing source code can lead to compromise of a developer’s workstation. This research is especially relevant in the context of attacks on security researchers using backdoored Visual Studio projects allegedly by North Korean actors, as exposed by Google. We will show that these in-the-wild attacks are only the tip of the iceberg and that backdoors can be hidden via much stealthier vectors in Visual Studio projects.

This post will be a journey into COM, type libraries and the inner workings of Visual Studio. In particular, it serves the following goals:

  • Exploring Visual Studio’s attack surface for initial access attacks from a red teamer’s perspective.
  • Raising awareness on the dangers of working with untrusted code, which we as hackers and security researchers do on a regular basis.

Read full post

A phishing document signed by Microsoft – part 2

This is the second part of our blog series in which we walk you through the steps of finding and weaponising other vulnerabilities in Microsoft signed add-ins. Our previous post described how a Microsoft-signed Analysis Toolpak Excel add-in (.XLAM) was vulnerable to code hijacking by loading an attacker controlled XLL via abuse of the RegisterXLL function.

In this post we will dive deep into a second code injection vulnerability in the Analysis Toolpak in relation to the use of the ExecuteExcel4Macro function in a Microsoft-signed Excel add-in. Furthermore, we will show that the Solver add-in is vulnerable to a similar weaknesses with yet another vector. In particular, we will discuss:

  • Walkthrough of the Analysis Toolpak code injection vulnerability patched by CVE-2021-28449
  • Exploitation gadgets for practical weaponisation of such a vulnerability
  • Weakness in Solver Add-in
  • Our analysis of Microsoft’s patch

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Read full post

A phishing document signed by Microsoft – part 1

This blog post is part of series of two posts that describe weaknesses in Microsoft Excel that could be leveraged to create malicious phishing documents signed by Microsoft that load arbitrary code.

These weaknesses have been addressed by Microsoft in the following patch: CVE-2021-28449. This patch means that the methods described in this post are no longer applicable to an up-to-date and securely configured MS Office install. However, we will uncover a largely unexplored attack surface of MS Office for further offensive research and will demonstrate practical tradecraft for exploitation.

In this blog post (part 1), we will discuss the following:

  • The Microsoft Analysis ToolPak Excel and vulnerabilities in XLAM add-ins which are distributed as part of this.
  • Practical offensive MS Office tradecraft which is useful for weaponizing signed add-ins which contain vulnerabilities,

Tags: , , , ,

Read full post

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,

Read full post

Catching red teams with honeypots part 1: local recon

This post is the first part of a series in which we will cover the concept of using honeypots in a Windows environment as an easy and cost-effective way to detect attacker (or red team) activities. Of course this blog post is about catching real attackers, not just red teams. But we picked this catchy title as the content is based on our red teaming experiences.

Upon mentioning honeypots, a lot of people still think about a system in the network hosting a vulnerable or weakly configured service. However, there is so much more you can do, instead of spawning a system. Think broad: honey files, honey registry keys, honey tokens, honey (domain) accounts or groups, etc.

In this post, we will cover:

  • The characteristics of an effective honeypot.
  • Walkthrough on configuring a file- and registry based honeypots using audit logging and SACLs.

Read full post

Direct Syscalls in Beacon Object Files

In this post we will explore the use of direct system calls within Cobalt Strike Beacon Object Files (BOF). In detail, we will:

  • Explain how direct system calls can be used in Cobalt Strike BOF to circumvent typical AV and EDR detections.
  • Release InlineWhispers: a script to make working with direct system calls more easy in BOF code.
  • Provide Proof-of-Concept BOF code which can be used to enable WDigest credential caching and circumvent Credential Guard by patching LSASS process memory.

Source code of the PoC can be found here:

https://github.com/outflanknl/WdToggle

Source code of InlineWhispers can be found here:

https://github.com/outflanknl/InlineWhispers

Read full post

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.

Read full post

Mark-of-the-Web from a Red Team’s Perspective

Zone Identifier Alternate Data Stream information, commonly referred to as Mark-of-the-Web (abbreviated MOTW), can be a significant hurdle for red teamers and penetration testers, especially when attempting to gain an initial foothold.

Your payload in the format of an executable, MS Office file or CHM file is likely to receive extra scrutiny from the Windows OS and security products when that file is marked as downloaded from the internet. In this blog post we will explain how this mechanism works and we will explore offensive techniques that can help evade or get rid of MOTW.

Note that the techniques described in this blog post are not new. We have witnessed all of them being abused in the wild. Hence, this blog post serves to raise awareness on these techniques for both red teamers (for more realistic adversary simulations) and blue teamers (for better countermeasures and understanding of attacker techniques).

Read full post