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..

On Wednesday, Microsoft released two new red teaming tools — Rampart and Clarity — meant to help developers design more secure agentic software and assist incident responders in the face of ongoing breaches.

Rampart is built on top of PyRIT, an existing open automation framework Microsoft developed for red teaming generative AI systems. But while PyRIT scans already-built systems for security flaws, Rampart is made to continuously test code for vulnerabilities during the development process, encoding both adversarial and benign testing scenarios into the software development pipeline to flag exploitable bugs and dependencies.

Microsoft said Rampart was built to focus on cross-prompt injection attacks, where “an agent retrieves or processes potentially poisoned content from documents, emails, tickets, and other data sources that manipulate behavior indirectly.” It also confirms fixes or exploits work as intended through multiple rounds of testing, as opposed to tools that perform “single shot validation.”

The second tool, Clarity, can be run as a desktop app, a web interface or directly embedded into a coding agent to provide real time security engineering guidance to developers at the outset of a project. It can categorize and track different business objectives related to the code and highlight downstream security implications along with more secure by design alternatives.

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, who founded Microsoft’s AI red team in 2019, told CyberScoop that the company has seen internal security benefits from using the tools, but believesRampart and Clarity’s growth depends on contributions from other developers outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

In the fast-moving world of AI, where vibe coding, rogue AI agents and a steady churn of new model releases create fresh security implications nearly every week, Siva Kumar said it was important to begin building foundational, AI-centric security processes into the software development pipeline.

“When you hear a lot of talk about AI safety and security, it seems to be a lot of philosophical debates,” he said. “You’ll see frameworks, you’ll see white papers, and I think we’re really past that time, now. We really need to start thinking of AI safety as an engineering discipline and trying to bring security where the developers are.”

Rampart’s potential utility to defenders goes beyond just securing software development pipelines. It can also be used during an active incident response to speed up or automate red teaming for hot fixes, patching and remediation.

Microsoft has used Rampart when investigating reported vulnerabilities in their own products. Siva Kumar said the tool was able to help condense a week’s worth of manual work —  replicating the vulnerability, identifying different variants of the same bug, then patching and re-testing those variants to ensure they’re no longer exploitable — into hours.

Clarity, meanwhile, acts as a security adviser for software projects, prompting developers to consider potential risks in their design decisions and their downstream security consequences. With the rise of AI-generated code and agents, and execution becoming cheaper, this kind of proactive guidance is increasingly important.

“You’re going to be able to create apps, create MCP servers to pull things out from the internet,” said Siva Kumar. “The question is, ‘should you be doing it?’ And Clarity is a step in that direction. It is asking, ‘hey, should you be doing this in the first place?’”

The post Meet Rampart and Clarity, Microsoft’s new red team combo AI agents appeared first on CyberScoop.

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..