Windows Server Hardening with PowerShell DSC

Operating system hardening is the process of improving the security of a default OS installation to minimize the attack surface that can be exploited by an attacker. But doing this manually on each system that is deployed on-premise or in the cloud is a cumbersome task. It can lead to inconsistent security configurations because of [...]

Evidence of VBA Purging Found in Malicious Documents

TL;DR We have found malicious Office documents containing VBA source code only, and no compiled code. Documents like these are more likely to evade anti-virus detection due to a technique we dubbed "VBA Purging". VBA Purging techniqueMalicious MS Office documents leveraging VBA, have their VBA code stored inside streams of Compound File Binary Format files. [...]

IoT hacking field notes #1: Intro to glitching attacks

TL;DR: First in a new series of short, IoT-related posts, this tells the story of a simple glitching attack we used to get a bootloader shell and ultimately root a device. IoT field notes is a new series of short stories about interesting (hopefully 🙂 ) observations, vulnerabilities and techniques, inspired directly from the IoT [...]

My journey reaching #1 on Hack The Box Belgium – 10 tips, tricks and lessons learned.

Ranked #1 on HackTheBox Belgium Not so long ago, I achieved a milestone in my penetration testing career.: reaching rank 1 on HackTheBox. For those of you that don't know what Hack The Box (HTB) is: Hack The Box is an online platform allowing you to test your penetration testing skills and exchange ideas and [...]

The return of the spoof part 2: Command line spoofing

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about the evolving landscape of threat detection and how attackers need to adapt their techniques. In the previous post, I talked about one of the deception techniques that attackers are now using, called parent process ID spoofing. In this blog post, I'll talk about another deception [...]

The return of the spoof part 1: Parent process ID spoofing

Years ago (as early as 2009), my colleague Didier Stevens wrote a blog post about parent process ID spoofing. Back then, most companies were not as secure as they are now, therefore, most attackers got away with 'basic' exploitation, not having the need to do much obfuscation or deception. Thankfully, the security posture of the [...]

What’s in a name? Thoughts on Red Team nomenclature

In my previous post, I promised to expand on the distinction between adversary emulation, adversary simulation, red teaming, and purple teaming, or at least how I tried to distinguish these terms in a way that made sense to me Emulation and simulation; I've heard both terms used interchangeably to refer to the same type of [...]

Thoughts on the recent Red Team debate

Around the end of November 2019, Florian Roth wrote a much-discussed post about problems he saw with today’s red teaming. I considered writing a blog post to diverge some of my ideas and “respond” to his concerns. However, as is often the case with these types of things, I didn’t get to it at the [...]

Deep dive into the security of Progressive Web Apps

In order to expand existing web applications to mobile and desktop environments,  more and more web developers are creating Progressive Web App (PWA) versions of their web applications. PWAs, originally proposed by Google in 2015, leverage the latest web standards to offer a native-like experience for both mobile and desktop applications.PWAs combine the best parts [...]