When the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tested defenses for two targets — one in the government sector and the other in the water sector — red teamers were able to get into both of their systems, but the water organization discovered the simulated attack and acted to defend itself, whereas the government organization did neither.

CISA published the breakdown Tuesday in a rare public report on its red-team activities, at a time when attacks on the water sector have a higher profile after revelations of targeting of water facilities across the United States over the past month and numerous government warnings.

The agency didn’t name the organizations it tested through a process that is voluntary and by-request.

“In one organization (Organization A), the team gained initial access to multiple workstations, gained elevated privileges over the domain, and moved laterally to [sensitive business systems] and cloud resources undetected,” CISA’s analysis reads. “In the second organization (Organization B), network defenders quickly detected the initial compromise and quarantined the affected systems.”

For “Organization A,” the government organization, CISA used an internal email address to send phishing emails to gain access to the workstations, probed further to gain elevated privileges, then moved around and compromised targeted sensitive business systems. The red teamers observed that the organization “did not respond effectively to red team activity” by accessing personnel emails at its security operations center, where they saw them receive low- and medium-severity endpoint detection and response alerts, but didn’t respond to them.

False positives by the thousands, including some with higher severity, “obscured the alerts triggered by red team activity,” CISA said. The agency also faulted “organizational silos.”

Meanwhile, at “Organization B,” the water organization, CISA got access via a spearphishing campaign, convincing three users to click on a malicious link to gain access to workstations. This time, the security operations center triaged the alerts and quarantined the work stations in 2, 10 and 20 minutes, respectively.

The red teamers tried another approach with the help of the organization’s IT contacts who were aware of the activity, but were foiled in their follow-ups.

“Because Organization B detected the initial compromise, the red team moved to an ‘assume breach’ model, where Organization B trusted agents (TAs) provided access to a host that replicated the level of access the red team would have had if defenders had not detected their activity,” CISA wrote. “From there, the red team escalated privileges and moved laterally to [sensitive business systems], cloud resources, and a bastion host in the OT [operational technology] demilitarized zone (DMZ), where defenders again detected activity and isolated the system.”

Still, CISA said both organizations had flaws in their defenses: They underestimated cloud risks; they lacked Conditional Access — a Microsoft security tool — for workload identities; and they didn’t have processes in place to revoke compromised access/refresh tokens.

CISA first published an advisory on its red team activity in 2023, but such advisories have been few and far between since. The agency said last year that it had not “laid off” its red team, after stories revealed the exit of contractors that included red-team members.

The post Water sector passes, government sector fails attempts to spot and halt simulated CISA attack appeared first on CyberScoop.

What we built, Fusion AI, runs at about a third the cost of a traditional external pentest, a human tester still signs off on every finding, and it is not here to replace anybody.
We have been hearing that one a lot. So when Melisa from our Business Capture team sat down with Brian Fehrman and me for this episode of AI Security Ops, she started with, “What is this thing you built, and is it the same hype everyone else is selling?”

The post Everyone’s Selling AI That Kills Pentesting. We Built One That Doesn’t. appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Welcome to GoGatoZ — a purpose-built Go tool for GitLab CI/CD security auditing that can perform and automate the entire CI/CD kill chain along with everything those one-off scripts did and then some.

The post Auditing GitLab: The CI/CD Kill Chain appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

There is a certain kind of conversation that doesn’t get written up in a post-mortem, doesn’t generate a ticket, and never makes it into an end-of-quarter report. It happens on the margins—at a conference, in a hallway, or, in this case, at 30,000 feet above sea level. It’s the conversation where two people who are solving the same problem from opposite ends of the table finally sit down next to each other.

The post Same Problem, Different Angles: When Red Team and Blue Team Actually Talk to Each Other appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, staying ahead of the curve is not just a goal—it’s a necessity. As new vulnerabilities emerge, the race to identify and mitigate them begins. But how do we, the guardians of the digital realm, rapidly pinpoint these threats as they become public? Let’s dive into the fascinating world of vulnerability identification and see how the magic happens.

The post How to Identify and Exploit New Vulnerabilities appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

This blog will not dive too deeply into BloodHound itself; instead, we will focus on various methods to collect AD data to provide BloodHound as input.

The post A Practical Guide to BloodHound Data Collection appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

An offensive security perspective on Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime, including architectural weaknesses, existing vulnerabilities, and exploitation methods.

The post Signed, Trusted, and Abused: Proxy Execution via WebView2 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Advice about getting started in pentesting from the BHIS pentest lead, including a learning path and why you should go all in on offensive security skills.

The post Getting Started In Pentesting – Advice From The BHIS Pentest Lead appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Learn about a pentesting tool using the Pluggable Authentication Module for privilege escalation, lateral movement, and persistence in Linux.

The post The “P” in PAM is for Persistence: Linux Persistence Technique appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

This scenario simultaneously tests identity confirmation tooling (SSPR, MFA, Conditional Access), how users act under pressure, and the organization's ability to detect and follow-up on social engineering attacks.

The post Social Engineering and Microsoft SSPR: The Road to Pwnage is Paved with Good Intentions  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

DomCat is a command-line tool written in Golang that helps the user find expired domains with desirable categorizations.

The post DomCat: A Domain Categorization Tool appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

A Content Security Policy (CSP) is a security mechanism implemented by web servers and enforced by browsers to prevent various types of attacks, primarily cross-site scripting (XSS). CSP works by restricting resources (scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.) on a webpage to only execute if they come from approved sources. However, like most things in security, CSP isn't bulletproof.

The post Bypassing CSP with JSONP: Introducing JSONPeek and CSP B Gone appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

An Infosec Survival Guide Resource, released as blog posts, with fully designed, printer-friendly PDF cheatsheets.

The post Offensive Tooling Cheatsheets: An Infosec Survival Guide Resource appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

One tool that I can't live without when performing a penetration test in an Active Directory environment is called NetExec. Being able to efficiently authenticate against multiple systems in the network is crucial, and NetExec is an incredibly powerful tool that helps automate a lot of this activity.

The post Getting Started with NetExec: Streamlining Network Discovery and Access appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Social engineering is the manipulation of individuals into divulging confidential information, granting unauthorized access, or performing actions that benefit the attacker, all without the victim realizing they are being tricked.

The post How to Design and Execute Effective Social Engineering Attacks by Phone appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

TL;DR If you only have access to a valid machine hash, you can leverage the Kerberos S4U2Self proxy for local privilege escalation, which allows reopening and expanding potential local-to-domain pivoting paths, such as SEImpersonate!

The post Abusing S4U2Self for Active Directory Pivoting appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Burpference is a Burp Suite plugin that takes requests and responses to and from in-scope web applications and sends them off to an LLM for inference. In the context of artificial intelligence, inference is taking a trained model, providing it with new information, and asking it to analyze this new information based on its training.

The post Augmenting Penetration Testing Methodology with Artificial Intelligence – Part 1: Burpference appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Volatility is a memory forensics tool that can pull SAM hashes from a vmem file. These hashes can be used to escalate from a local user or no user to a domain user leading to further compromise.

The post Offline Memory Forensics With Volatility appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

This webcast originally aired on February 27, 2025. Join us for a very special free one-hour Black Hills Information Security webcast with Corey Ham & Kelli Tarala on why your […]

The post Why Your Org Needs a Penetration Test Program appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

GoPhish provides a nice platform for creating and running phishing campaigns. This blog will guide you through installing GoPhish and creating a campaign. 

The post Gone Phishing: Installing GoPhish and Creating a Campaign appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..