Art of Anti Detection 4 – Self-Defense

Throughout the Art of Anti Detection series we have mainly looked at methods for bypassing automated security products, but in this part we will focus on several self-defense methods for protecting our foothold on the target machines against actual users. These users may be technically insufficient employees or they may be blue team members in a cyber incident division of a company. Our goal is to stay alive and hide our presence inside the target system without having any privileges. But before getting deeper i advise you to read the previous articles of this series, because these methods will include a lot of shellcoding and API hooking thus requires prior knowledge. Now lets get to it !

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Offensive IAT Hooking

This article will be about using IAT hooking methods for offensive purposes. These methods can be used in multiple situations where attacker needs to evade certain defense and analysis mechanism or hide from the victim in low privileged environments. Before getting into the technical stuff reader needs to be familiar with the following terminology. Read More

Introducing New Packing Method: First Reflective PE Packer Amber

Because of the increasing security standards inside operating systems and rapid improvements on malware detection technologies today’s malware authors takes advantage of the transparency offered by in-memory execution methods. In-memory execution or fileless execution of a PE file can be defined as executing a compiled PE file inside the memory with manually performing the operations that OS loader supposed to do when executing the PE file normally. In-memory execution of a malware facilitates the obfuscation and anti-emulation techniques. Additionally the malware that is using such methods leaves less footprints on the system since it does not have to possess a file inside the hard drive. Combining in-memory execution methods and multi stage infection models allows malware to infect systems with very small sized loader programs; only purpose of a loader is loading and executing the actual malware code via connecting to a remote system. Using small loader codes are hard to detect by security products because of the purpose and the code fragments of loaders are very common among legitimate applications. Malware that are using this approach can still be detected with scanning the memory and inspecting the behaviors of processes but in terms of security products these operation are harder to implement and costly because of the higher resource usage (Ramilli, 2010[1]). Read More

What is LLMNR & WPAD and How to Abuse Them During Pentest ?

In internal penetration tests, we simulate attacks that can be performed against on misconfigured services and protocols on network-level.These attacks are mostly caused by the fact that mechanisms such as Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and Domain Name System (DNS) are not configured properly.One of the most important attacks that can be encountered is undoubtedly Man-in-the-Middle. It allows access to sensitive information by listening to network traffic or manipulating the target to be accessed. Security measures against this attack can be taken on network equipment such as routers and switches. However, due to the inherent weaknesses of some protocols, we can perform the same attack with different methods. For this reason, the main theme of this article will be Man-in-the-Middle attacks against LLMNR, NetBIOS and WPAD mechanisms. Before begin, I would like to explain how the computers have Windows operating system communicate with each other in the same network and perform name resolution. Read More

How to Perform DDoS Test as a Pentester

A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make a service unavailable. Unlike other kinds of attacks, which establishes foothold or hijacks data, DoS attacks do not threat sensitive information. It is just an attempt to make a service unavailable to legitimate users. However, sometimes DoS might also be used for creating another attack floor for other malicious activities. (e.g. taking down web application firewalls) Read More