Insider Threat Security Blog

Today, I came across an interesting article (since posting, the original post has been taken offline) where the author described how an attacker could manipulate the permissions on extended attributes to create persistence once they have compromised an Active Directory domain.  Read the article for a great breakdown of the attack, but here’s a quick summary. Step 1 – Domain Compromise An attacker compromised Domain Admin privileges within Active Directory and wants to make sure they create some backdoors in…

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Lateral movement techniques like Pass-the-Hash, Pass-the-Ticket, and Overpass-the-Hash provide attackers with ways to take stolen or compromised credentials and spread out across a network to achieve privilege escalation.  I recently found myself testing some Active Directory attacks from a Kali Linux host, and needed a way to use compromised credentials from this Linux system on my Windows boxes.  Luckily, this is something supported by Mimikatz and surprisingly easy to perform.  This technique, known as Pass-the-Cache, allows an attacker to take…

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Now that we’ve looked at how pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket attacks work and what to do to detect them, let’s take a look at overpass-the-hash.  Basically, this is a combination of both attacks. The idea of overpass-the-hash is for an attacker to leverage the NTLM hash of another user account to obtain a Kerberos ticket which can be used to access network resources. This can come in handy if you are only able to obtain the NTLM hash for an account,…

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In our first post of the series, we looked at some interesting ways to detect the pass-the-hash attack. Pass-the-hash is an effective approach for exploiting NTLM authentication within an Active Directory domain. Pass-the-ticket is an alternate approach which leverages Kerberos authentication to perform lateral movement.  In this post we will dive into how this attack works and what you can do to detect it. How Pass-the-Ticket Works In a pass-the-ticket attack, an attacker is able to extract a Kerberos Ticket Granting Ticket…

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This is the first in a 3-part blog series, that will be followed by a webinar February 28th. Lateral movement techniques are one of the most common approaches attackers can use to infiltrate your network and obtain privileged access to your credentials and data. This has been seen recently with modern ransomware such as SamSam and Ryuk. We’ve looked recently at how to detect pass-the-hash attacks using honeypots and in doing research into the most effective ways to detect this type…

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So far in this series, we’ve learned about the HoneyHash, a useful honeypot technique for detecting Pass-the-Hash and credential theft within a Windows environment.  We then looked into how to monitor for an attacker triggering the honeypot, and how to gather the necessary forensic details to investigate the attack.  Now let’s look at what you need to do to roll out the honeypot across multiple endpoints in your environment. There are some basic challenges we need to consider.  First, we…

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In our first post of this series, we explored the Honeyhash, and how it can be used to create a honeypot to catch attackers performing credential theft and pass-the-hash attacks.  Now that our trap is set, we need to make sure we can catch any attacker in the act who may fall for it. The concept of detection for the Honeyhash is simple.  We put a fake account in memory on a system, so let’s see if anybody tries to…

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