The use of Cloud infrastructure has substantially grown over the years. As people become more comfortable with the technology, it will certainly continue to grow. With comfortability, comes an overabundance and reliance on the use of the platforms in the Cloud. While this could be great for users and organizations,
Powershell
Validating the Presence of an Item across multiple computers
All too often an interesting item is discovered on a system and everyone wants to know if the item exists on any other system. This could be a daunting task but this can be accomplished using PowerShell. With the location and name of the file in hand, the following can
Parsing IIS Logs
Windows variant of a webserver is called Internet Information Services (IIS). The feature comes as part of Windows server builds but isn’t enabled but default. If you manage an IIS server, logs write to c:\inetpub\logs by default and without a tool or capability, aren’t necessarily the easiest to read. With
Reducing the Attack Surface for BlueKeep
It’s been a few months since the BlueKeep vulnerability was brought to light. This discovery shouldn’t be taken lightly as it allows a malicious user to gain unauthenticated access and the ability to perform remote code execution on Windows systems. The documentation on the vulnerability depicts that the following operating
Invoke-Fail2Ban
Anyone who has a system that is accessible on the Internet has likely had their fair share of brute force attempts. Utilizing something like Fail2ban is great because it blocks those type of attacks, providing some level of security. The downfall about Fail2ban is that it was developed for *nix
Finding Services Tied to Processes
When looking at a process list, you will undoubtedly see a number of svchost processes. The overall number of them really depends on the system and what services are running. Each svchost has at least one service running within it. If you are seeking a better understanding of which service
Fileless Malware Storage: Group Policy Objects- 4 of 4
Up to this point, we’ve discussed using the Registry, Active Directory, and Event Logs for storing stagers in Windows. In our last installment of this series, we will discuss the use of Group Policy Objects to achieve the same goal. Group Policy is designed to be a hierarchal infrastructure to
Fileless Malware Storage: Event Logs– 3 of 4
Up to this point, we’ve touched on using Active Directory and the Registry to store code for later use. To add on to the topic, we can also use Event Logs. The effectiveness of this technique is based on the environment in which one looks to use it. I say
Fileless Malware Storage: Active Directory– 2 of 4
In my last post, I spoke on the use of the Registry to store malicious code to call upon at a later time. In this post, I’ll discuss using Active Directory to store code. Essentially, Active Directory is a hierarchical structure that stores information about objects on the network, particularly
Fileless Malware Storage: Registry – 1 of 4
Malware delivery methods have changed over the years and in some cases, repeated themselves. Within the last couple of years, fileless malware has become prevalent and more widely seen. How this malware is stored on disk varies. Frankly speaking, anywhere that can store data, be it hex or ascii, serves
Don’t Forget about Domain Trusts
I recently was talking to an organization about their security posture and mostly everything I recommended to them, they had already implemented and plus some. The audits I conducted for them seconded what they were saying. I must say, I was thoroughly impressed. There was, however, one gray area that
Hunting Self-signed Certificates
Self-signed certificates could be indicative of malicious behavior on a system and being able to identify them is a key task in responding to an incident. Having self-signed certificates in an environment isn’t always a bad thing but not being able to identify them and their purpose is! Nonetheless, taking
Hashes of All Running Processes
A great starting point for anyone analyzing a system is the running processes. Taking the time to not only retrieve the command line execution of the process but also the parent process will enable you to find outliers. Taking it a step further, retrieving the hashes of the binary of
PowerShell Cheat Sheet
I recall when I started out in PowerShell coming from Python. Some aspects of the language I was able to pick up on rather quickly while other aspects took some take. I found myself writing down notes until I was able to remember them on my own. Reminiscing on that
Find Malicious Versions of CCleaner
In light of the recent discovery about the malicious versions of CCleaner and the millions affected, it felt like a great time to write some PowerShell scripts that enable a person to identify if the malicious versions of CCleaner are on a system and if so, provides a method to
Determining WinRM connections to a Machine
PSRemoting is an awesome feature in Microsoft Windows that serves as a ssh-like function. In Server 2012 and newer, it is enabled by default. You will, however, need to enable the feature on any client system you’d want to use it on. Some organizations feel having the service enabled throughout
Base64 with PowerShell
All too often I find myself on a Windows system and need to either encode or decode base64. Rather than using an online service, installing a program, or going to a *nix based system, I took to PowerShell. In PowerShell, we can use .NET to accomplish this. Encoding: $Text2Encode =
Getting hashes with Microsoft’s File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV)
Are you responding to an incident? Are you trying to hash particular portions of the disk for comparison with a known good hashes? Are you questioning whether or not to trust the binaries on the possibly compromised system disk in order to get said hashes? Well have no fear, Microsoft
Get Registry Hives and Keys Remotely
Talking with a buddy of mine, the conversation about retrieving Registry Hives and Keys remotely came up. He initially was looking for something he could use and eventually sided with an open-source program on the web. I, myself, tested said program as well and it for the most part did
Finding Passwords in Text Files with PowerShell
Using PowerShell, we can look in text files for strings that fit the criteria for passwords and return the potential password, file path, and line number. The criteria that is being search uses regex expressions and looks for at least four characters but no more than 15 with at least
Mass Import of McAfee Firewall Domains to block
As of late, I’ve been experimenting more and more with the McAfee HIPS Firewall with the McAfee ePO. So far, I think it is decent. It is at least stateful, so that’s a plus. The firewall has a feature to block domains and using the GUI, you can only add
Sinkhole Domains Using DNS with the help of PowerShell
Thanks to Jason Fossen, there was no need to create a PowerShell script to input domains to sink. He had already created one called Sinkhole-DNS.ps1 (located here). One of the options in the script is to read in a file with domains listed. I like to frequent www.malwaredomains.com for my
BlueSpectrum, an IOC framework written in PowerShell
The code can be found on my github at https://github.com/wiredpulse/BlueSpectrum. It was written to work with version 2 and newer. The idea behind this is to use what is available rather than always relying on a plethora of tools.
Under The Wire!
Under The Wire, the PowerShell gaming server is now web based and can be access at www.underthewire.tech. On there, you will find directions to access our servers using you own instance of PowerShell. To date, we have two games that are live with another in production.
Under the Wire v2
I just posted v2 of Under to Wire which contains an additional 5 levels to Century. V2 can be found at the link on the right-hand side of the screen or here. This release will be the last one containing Century and the next variation that the team and I
PowerShell Web Server for Raw Text Transmission
This script will create a temporary web server on the local system and will listen on the host IP and specified port. You will then be able to post some raw data that will be accessible on the network. When running the script you will be asked what port to
PowerShell Web Server for File Transmission
This script will deploy a temporary web server on the local system and will listen on the port of your choice. Once it is listening, you will be able to transfer .txt and .html files from the directory in which the script is ran from (not located). The web server
PowerShell Network Connection Monitor Script
This script displays the current TCP/IP connections for a local or remote system to include the PID, process name, port, and its current running state (listening, established, etc..). If the port is not yet established, the port number is shown as an asterisk (*). It will also take the initial
PowerShell Remote Process Termination
Ever remotely executed a program on another system but the process failed to exit which lead it to being an active process on the users system? No matter the cause or what your purpose on the system is, that is never a good thing. We can quickly fix the issue
Detecting Alternate Data Streams with PowerShell and DOS
Alternate Data Streams (ADS) are nothing new and there are a few ways to detect them within a NTFS filesystem. My tools of choice for detecting an ADS is LADS (List Alternate Data Streams) by Frank Heyne or SysInternals’ Streams… both of which work rather well. My issue though is
Under the Wire… Windows Shell War Gaming
My boss and I had a conversation a few months ago regarding Over the Wire, a Linux war gaming server. The conversation revolved around how it was a great tool for those trying to build strength in Linux. From that conversation, we had a thought of why there wasn’t a
Display Credentials For All Previous Wireless Networks Connected To
I was at a friend’s house and needed to connect my laptop to his network. My friend was reluctant to give me password to his network and decided to type it in himself. In his mind, he was just doing his part to provide some security to his home network,