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..

Deceptive-Auditing is a tool that deploys Active Directory honeypots and automatically enables auditing for those honeypots.

The post Deceptive-Auditing: An Active Directory Honeypots Tool appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Cybersecurity authorities and threat analysts unveiled alarming details Thursday about a suspected China state-sponsored espionage and data theft campaign that Google previously warned about in September. The outlook based on their limited visibility into China’s sustained ability to burrow into critical infrastructure and government agency networks undetected, dating back to at least 2022, is grim.

“State-sponsored actors are not just infiltrating networks, they are embedding themselves to enable long-term access, disruptions and potential sabotage,” Nick Andersen, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during a media briefing.

Brickstorm, a backdoor which Andersen described as a “terribly sophisticated piece of malware,” has allowed the attackers to achieve persistent access with an average duration of 393 days to support immediate data theft and follow-on pivots to other malicious activity, Austin Larsen, principal analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, told CyberScoop.

“We believe dozens of organizations in the United States have been impacted by Brickstorm, not including downstream victims,” Larsen said.

CISA, the National Security Agency and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security released an analysis report on Brickstorm, which targets VMware vSphere and Windows environments to conceal activity, achieve lateral movement and tunnel into victim networks while also automatically reinstalling or restarting the malware if disrupted. CISA provided indicators of compromise based on eight Brickstorm samples it obtained from victim organizations.

China state-sponsored attackers are primarily implanting Brickstorm into the networks of organizations in government, IT and legal services, and targeting edge devices, software as a service providers and business process outsourcers to gain access to downstream targets, according to officials and researchers.

Andersen declined to say how many government agencies have been impacted or the type of data stolen, but the scope of assumed impact is far greater than what’s been uncovered to date. “I think it’s a logical conclusion to assume that there are additional victims out there that we have not yet had the opportunity to communicate with,” he said.

CrowdStrike, which attributes the attacks to Warp Panda, and GTIG, which attributes the activity to UNC5221, both said the Brickstorm campaign goes back to at least 2022. Yet, the intrusions involving Brickstorm weren’t detected until last summer.

“Their infrastructure expansion, evolution of their tooling, and continued ability to exploit cloud misconfigurations all point to a campaign that remains highly active,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike said it also observed Warp Panda deploy two previously unobserved implants called Junction and GuestConduit. All of the malware is written in Golang. 

The threat group has stolen configuration data, identity metadata, documents and emails on topics that align with China’s government interest, Meyers said.

“While we haven’t observed destructive follow-on actions, the intelligence value alone is significant. Access to this kind of cloud-resident data gives a state actor the ability to map infrastructure, study dependencies, and position themselves for future operations,” he added. “That’s what makes this campaign so dangerous, it’s espionage with strategic depth.”

CISA provided details about a 2024 attack on an unnamed organization’s internal network as an example of the threat group’s operations, but much remains unknown. Authorities still don’t know key details about how attackers obtained initial access in that incident, when the webshell was implanted or how they obtained credentials for a second account to move laterally to a domain controller using remote desktop protocol.

Attackers involved in that incident copied the organization’s Active Directory database, obtained credentials for a managed service provider account and used those credentials to move from the internal domain controller to the VMware vCenter server. Officials said the attackers also jumped multiple servers to steal cryptographic keys and elevated privileges, which allowed them to deploy Brickstorm malware in the server’s directory. 

The attacks revive and amplify enduring concerns about China’s cyberespionage activity, mirroring other campaigns with similar objectives based on living-off-the-land techniques attributed to other prominent China state-sponsored threat groups.

“Compared to past China-nexus efforts, this campaign represents an evolution of tradecraft,” Meyers said. “It shows a deep understanding of multi-cloud environments and the identity fabrics that tie them together.”

A sustained lack of insight into China’s already achieved goals and what these persistent backdoors might ultimately allow attackers to accomplish down the line is startling.

The Brickstorm campaign effectively blends objectives spanning espionage, intellectual property theft and persistent access that attackers could use for follow-on malicious activity, Larsen said.

The nation-state attackers are also remarkably stealth, exploiting gaps in networks where detection tools can’t be deployed and prioritizing the compromise of perimeter and remote access infrastructure where log retention is often insufficient to determine the initial access vector, he added. 

“Identifying this activity is exceptionally difficult because it targets appliances and edge devices that are often poorly inventoried and unmonitored,” Larsen said. “This level of operational security and the focus on ‘unmanageable’ devices places it among some of the most evasive nation-state activities we track.”

The post Officials warn about expansive, ongoing China espionage threat riding on Brickstorm malware appeared first on CyberScoop.

This is the third in a three-part series of blog posts discussing how to abuse Kerberos delegation! If you haven't already, feel free to read the first blog post, as they discuss the Kerberos authentication process and how delegation plays an important role in solving the double-hop problem, and how to abuse unconstrained delegation.

The post Abusing Delegation with Impacket (Part 3): Resource-Based Constrained Delegation appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

This is the second in a three-part series of blog posts discussing how to abuse Kerberos delegation! If you haven't already, feel free to read the first blog post, as it discusses the Kerberos authentication process and how delegation plays an important role in solving the double-hop problem.

The post Abusing Delegation with Impacket (Part 2): Constrained Delegation appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In Active Directory exploitation, Kerberos delegation is easily among my top favorite vectors of abuse, and in the years I’ve been learning Kerberos exploitation, I’ve noticed that Impacket doesn’t get nearly as much coverage as tools like Rubeus or Mimikatz.

The post Abusing Delegation with Impacket (Part 1): Unconstrained Delegation appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) is used to manage certificates for systems, users, applications, and more in an enterprise environment. Misconfigurations in ADCS can introduce critical vulnerabilities into an enterprise Active Directory environment.

The post Detecting ADCS Privilege Escalation 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..

In this video, Kent Ickler and Jordan Drysdale discuss Attack Tactics 9: Shadow Credentials for Primaries, focusing on a specific technique used in penetration testing services at Black Hills Information Security

The post Attack Tactics 9: Shadow Creds for PrivEsc w/ Kent & Jordan appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

| Alyssa Snow In PART ONE and PART TWO of this blog series, we discussed common misconfigurations of Active Directory certificate templates. In this post, we will walk through exploitation […]

The post Abusing Active Directory Certificate Services (Part 3) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Misconfigurations in Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) can introduce critical vulnerabilities into an Enterprise Active Directory environment, such as paths of escalation from low privileged accounts to domain administrator.

The post Abusing Active Directory Certificate Services (Part 2) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) is used for public key infrastructure in an Active Directory environment. ADCS is widely used in enterprise Active Directory environments for managing certificates for systems, users, applications, and more.

The post Abusing Active Directory Certificate Services (Part 1) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Kent Ickler // It’s been over two years since Jordan and I talked about a Blue Team’s perspective on Red Team tools.   A Blue Team’s Perspective on Red Team Hack […]

The post PlumHound Reporting Engine for BloodHoundAD appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

BHIS’ Defensery Driven Duo Delivers Another Delectable Transmission! We know you are worried about your networks. After hours of discussion, we’ve come to the realization that some of our dedicated […]

The post Webcast: Let’s Talk About ELK Baby, Let’s Talk About You and AD appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

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Click on the timecodes to jump to that part of the video (on YouTube) Slides for this webcast can be found here: https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/SLIDES_WeaponizingActiveDirectory.pdf 0:54 Background behind this webcast, what and […]

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For this podcast we cover a couple of different topics. First, we talk about how to password spray in a non-attributable sort of way. Beau found a way to obfuscate […]

The post PODCAST: RDP Logging Bypass and Azure Active Directory Recon appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

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For this webcast we cover a couple of different topics. First, we talk about how to password spray in a non-attributable sort of way. Beau found a way to obfuscate […]

The post WEBCAST: RDP Logging Bypass and Azure Active Directory Recon appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Mike Felch // With so many Microsoft technologies, services, integrations, applications, and configurations it can create a great deal of difficulty just to manage everything. Now imagine trying to secure […]

The post Red Teaming Microsoft: Part 1 – Active Directory Leaks via Azure appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

// Jordan Drysdale and Kent Ickler talk about Best Practices for setting up Active Directory. Bre joins as fake Sierra to host and ask questions from the audience since real […]

The post PODCAST: Active Directory Best Practices that Frustrate Pentesters appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

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Kent Ickler & Jordan Drysdale // BHIS Webcast and Podcast This post accompanies BHIS’s webcast recorded on August 7, 2018, Active Directory Best Practices to Frustrate Attackers, which you can view below. […]

The post Active Directory Best Practices to Frustrate Attackers: Webcast & Write-up appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..