Adversary Services

The Pwn2Own computer hacking contest has been around since 2007, and during that time, there has never been a female to score a full win — until now. This milestone was reached at Pwn2Own 2024 in Vancouver, where two women, Valentina Palmiotti and Emma Kirkpatrick, each secured full wins by exploiting kernel vulnerabilities in Microsoft […]

CVE-2023-20078 catalogs an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability in the web-based management interface of Cisco 6800, 7800, and 8800 Series IP Phones with Multiplatform Firmware installed; however, limited technical analysis is publicly available. This article presents my findings while researching this vulnerability. In the end, the reader should be equipped with the information necessary to understand […]

Being part of the Adversary Services team at IBM, it is important to keep your skills up to date and learn new things constantly. macOS security was one field where I decided to put more effort this year to further improve my exploitation and operation skills in macOS environments. During my research, I decided to […]

NightHawk, MDSec’s commercial C2 product, has focused on operational security and detection avoidance since its initial release in December 2021. While the core functionality of the framework has been effective within the scope of these objectives, our team noticed certain features were missing as we started incorporating NightHawk into our engagements alongside our other C2 […]

Last month Microsoft patched a vulnerability in the Microsoft Kernel Streaming Server, a Windows kernel component used in the virtualization and sharing of camera devices. The vulnerability, CVE-2023-36802, allows a local attacker to escalate privileges to SYSTEM. This blog post details my process of exploring a new attack surface in the Windows kernel, finding a […]

In a blog published this March, we explored reflective loading through the lens of an offensive security tool developer, highlighting detection and evasion opportunities along the way. This time we are diving into call stack detections and evasions, and how BokuLoader reflectively loads call stack spoofing capabilities into beacon. We created this blog and public […]

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privileged opportunity to peek behind the veil of some of the largest organizations in the world. In my experience, most industry verticals rely on enterprise Windows networks. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a decentralized zero-trust network, […]

The security updates released by Microsoft on April 11, 2023, addressed over 90 individual vulnerabilities. Of particular note was CVE-2023-21554, dubbed QueueJumper, a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the Microsoft Message Queueing (MSMQ) service. MSMQ is an optional Windows component that enables applications to exchange messages via message queues that are reachable both locally and […]

In this post, we’ll review a simple technique that we’ve developed to encrypt Cobalt Strike’s Beacon in memory while executing BOFs to prevent a memory scan from detecting Beacon. Picture this — you’re on a red team engagement and your phish went through, your initial access payload got past EDR, your beacon is now living […]

‘Patch Tuesday, Exploit Wednesday’ is an old hacker adage that refers to the weaponization of vulnerabilities the day after monthly security patches become publicly available. As security improves and exploit mitigations become more sophisticated, the amount of research and development required to craft a weaponized exploit has increased. This is especially relevant for memory corruption […]

The challenge with using Cobalt strike for advanced red team exercises While next-generation AI and machine-learning components of security solutions continue to enhance behavioral-based detection capabilities, at their core many still rely on signature-based detections. Cobalt Strike being a popular red team Command and Control (C2) framework used by both threat actors and red teams […]

Overview In this post, IBM Security X-Force Red offensive hackers analyze how attackers, with elevated privileges, can use their access to stage Windows Kernel post-exploitation capabilities. Over the last few years, public accounts have increasingly shown that less sophisticated attackers are using this technique to achieve their objectives. It is therefore important that we put […]