Lina is writing the technical content our industry needs: deeply technical, clearly explained, and appropriate for both offense and defense audiences. See her writings here: inversecos.com
My favorite offense-centered post: "AWS ReadOnlyAccess: Not Even Once" by @hotnops.
Not only introduces a new-to-me area in a way that's easy to understand (AWS roles/permissions), but also includes both a "read first" and "drink first" section:
My favorite defense-centered post: "Abstracting Scheduled Tasks" by @jsecurity101.
Scheduled tasks: the "commodity-level" tradecraft that attackers continue to find detection bypasses around. This post should be required reading for detection engineers: posts.specterops.io/abstracting-sc…
My favorite Twitter thread: this one by @jaredcatkinson, where Jared gives a masters class in detecting SharpHound enumeration:
Finally, my favorite overall blog: "Good Workaround!" by @mariussmellum.
While not strictly-speaking security related, Marius has done phenomenal work in understanding and explaining concepts, APIs, and the inner-working mechanisms that drive Azure:
Enough time has passed now that we are starting to see the outcomes of this methodology, which I'd like to talk to you about:
Strip away the brands, the tools, the people, and everything else, and you are left with the only thing that REALLY matters:
The problem.
The problem that APM seeks to solve is the persistent availability and reliability of attack paths.
Pentesters, red teamers, and real attackers have been abusing attack paths, specifically in Active Directory, for over 20 years. AD attack paths are INSANELY reliable. They can be abused with reliable tools, including legitimate admin tools like Powershell and PsExec.
This service is accessible to every VM in Azure. As far as I know, there's no reason to ever disable this service for a VM, so it should always be accessible to every Azure VM.
IMDS's REST API is available to each VM at the non-routable, local IP of 169.254.169.254.
“Attackers think in graphs. Defenders think in lists. As long as this is true, attackers win.”
If you’ve seen more than one of my talks, you might think I’m contractually obligated to include this quote in every talk I do.
This quote means a lot to me. A LOT. Graph theory, to me, almost seems like it was invented solely for the information security field. Its purpose and reach is obviously waaaaaaay further than our field, but…
… we have BARELY scratched the surface of what’s possible with applied graph theory in information security. The core feature of #BloodHound is finding the shortest path between two nodes. The algorithm this is based on was first published in 1959.
There are worlds of untapped security research opportunities in Azure - growing, dynamic, and multiplying worlds. The next few years will produce amazing research. Get a head start with the following resources: