Adversary Services

In a blog published this March, we explored reflective loading through the lens of an offensive security tool developer, highlighting detection and evasion opportunities along the way. This time we are diving into call stack detections and evasions, and how BokuLoader reflectively loads call stack spoofing capabilities into beacon. We created this blog and public […]

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privileged opportunity to peek behind the veil of some of the largest organizations in the world. In my experience, most industry verticals rely on enterprise Windows networks. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a decentralized zero-trust network, […]

The security updates released by Microsoft on April 11, 2023, addressed over 90 individual vulnerabilities. Of particular note was CVE-2023-21554, dubbed QueueJumper, a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the Microsoft Message Queueing (MSMQ) service. MSMQ is an optional Windows component that enables applications to exchange messages via message queues that are reachable both locally and […]

In this post, we’ll review a simple technique that we’ve developed to encrypt Cobalt Strike’s Beacon in memory while executing BOFs to prevent a memory scan from detecting Beacon. Picture this — you’re on a red team engagement and your phish went through, your initial access payload got past EDR, your beacon is now living […]

‘Patch Tuesday, Exploit Wednesday’ is an old hacker adage that refers to the weaponization of vulnerabilities the day after monthly security patches become publicly available. As security improves and exploit mitigations become more sophisticated, the amount of research and development required to craft a weaponized exploit has increased. This is especially relevant for memory corruption […]

The challenge with using Cobalt strike for advanced red team exercises While next-generation AI and machine-learning components of security solutions continue to enhance behavioral-based detection capabilities, at their core many still rely on signature-based detections. Cobalt Strike being a popular red team Command and Control (C2) framework used by both threat actors and red teams […]

Overview In this post, IBM Security X-Force Red offensive hackers analyze how attackers, with elevated privileges, can use their access to stage Windows Kernel post-exploitation capabilities. Over the last few years, public accounts have increasingly shown that less sophisticated attackers are using this technique to achieve their objectives. It is therefore important that we put […]

September’s Patch Tuesday unveiled a critical remote vulnerability in tcpip.sys, CVE-2022-34718. The advisory from Microsoft reads: “An unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted IPv6 packet to a Windows node where IPsec is enabled, which could enable a remote code execution exploitation on that machine.” Pure remote vulnerabilities usually yield a lot of interest, but […]

In September 2022, Microsoft patched an information disclosure vulnerability in SPNEGO NEGOEX (CVE-2022-37958). On December 13, Microsoft reclassified the vulnerability as “Critical” severity after IBM Security X-Force Red Security Researcher Valentina Palmiotti discovered the vulnerability could allow attackers to remotely execute code. The vulnerability is in the SPNEGO Extended Negotiation (NEGOEX) Security Mechanism, which allows […]

Command & Control (C2) frameworks are a very sensitive component of Red Team operations. Often, a Red Team will be in a highly privileged position on a target’s network, and a compromise of the C2 framework could lead to a compromise of both the red team operator’s system and control over beacons established on a […]

For full details on this research, see the X-Force Red whitepaper “Controlling the Source: Abusing Source Code Management Systems”. This material is also being presented at Black Hat USA 2022. Source Code Management (SCM) systems play a vital role within organizations and have been an afterthought in terms of defenses compared to other critical enterprise […]

Some of you love it and some of you hate it, but at this point it should come as no surprise that .NET tradecraft is here to stay a little longer than anticipated. The .NET framework is an integral part of Microsoft’s operating system with the most recent release of .NET being .NET core. Core […]