Intro to Applied Cybersec
Lecture Notes
Assignments

Lecture 08: Server architecture, Intro to pentesting

Remember to STAY IN SCOPE!!!

Server architecture

Please see slides here

Intro to Pentesting

Please STAY IN SCOPE!

Red v. Blue

Traditionally, a red team pentest is conducted with no insider knowledge of the attacking enviornment (i.e., they pretend to be actual malicious hackers to gain access to your systems). Purple team pentests work with the blue teams to establish targets, helps add defenses to “steps along the way” and provide more specific goals.

Advantages of purple teaming – If an organization does excellently at preventing initial access, purple team can still provide benefits to an org as they can bypass inital security checks. Advantages of red teaming – Harder to overlook low-hanging vulnerabilities since they are literally coming from the perspective of attackers. Blue team won’t tell you what is “easy” or “hard” to break into!

Playbook

  1. Reconnaissance
    • Talk to your clients!
    • OSINT (passive and/or active)
    • Intelligence gathering
  2. Scanning / Vulnerability Assessment
    • Answer: What’s available to be attacked? What sorts of vulnerabilities should I be considering?
    • nmap
    • nessus
    • metasploit
  3. Exploitation
    • Attack phase!
    • Look at CVEs, known vulnerabilities
    • Eternalblue (windows)
    • Mimikatz
    • Metasploit is also useful here
    • MITRE ATT&CK frameworks
  4. Post-Exploitation
    • More in depth attacking & cleanup
    • Command and control, laternal movement, privilege escalations
    • Make sure you cleanup! Don’t leave your client’s systems in a mess!
  5. Report
    • No report == nothing being done

In class example

We went through the Cap Machine on HackTheBox as a demo.

Resources

Remember to STAY IN SCOPE!!!

Recording