Now that my health is stable again, I will be resuming the development of the #Hephaestus project with a few new additions I would like to share.

For those who missed it the Hephaestus project was originally presented at #Hushcon in 2017: github.com/glinares/Offic…
Microsoft in the last year has done quite a few great features to enhance Office security and the overall posture of Office based exploits seem to be lower than a year ago.

However with this I am pivoting a bit on how #Hephaestus will be used and leveraged in #Redteam events
#Hephaestus will be a 2nd phase tool that will allow an operator to exploit a system using Microsoft Office components as sort of a puppet. Think of how many tools use Powershell in order to compromise systems and stay persistent and gather system info.
#Hephaestus will also have a macro obfuscator & VBA payload delivery system, all of the features you saw in my demo and presentations with @digbei will be added.
Another feature will be to assist in developing an easy way for developers to write COM interaction with Office, to allow RATs to instantiate Office & conduct all of their activities through the signed and trusted office binaries as a proxy.
The GUI will still be point and click development, I wanted to mimic the old school NUKE VCL experience as much as possible - so that redteams can quickly develop a tool with a few button presses and have a product delivered.
And finally for the #Blueteams & #PurpleTeams out there, I haven't forgotten about you:

I will be releasing a zine style doc on all the features & methods inside #Hephaestus to allow you to read in depth how methods such as the Anti-analysis, obfuscation, and other methods work
This will probably be the largest & most detailed document on Office malware / techniques to date (I wrote one many years ago for a few virii zines and this will surpass that easily). It will also be a great tool for RE & Malware analysts to have.

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More from @Laughing_Mantis

May 9
A 🧵I wanted to share one of my more recent successful red team campaigns so others can test & tabletop

The client, like many others recently, implemented an approved internal AI interface for code questions and searches

This was essentially a wrapped chatGPT UI + file search
The site was 3rd party developed and has several implementations before rolling out in stages to all departments

For this scenario the goal was to compromise a separate dev and finance team with limited access in order to gain access to the production environment and financials
The attack first created a spoofed Google cloud and email to appear similar to the 3rd party company who used this service.

At this point a spoofed email was sent to several junior developers and low level HR people on the target teams posing as the AI portal dev team.
Read 16 tweets
Mar 27
Fam

It's 11pm and the VC bros next to me are starting a company and are gonna roll out WordPress as their CRM, and they think they can manage it themselves with a Microsoft Azure cloud and MongoDB. None of them have admin experience

💀💀💀💀
This is at a hotel bar

They are in the carbon footprint reduction industry, I have no clue wtaf that involves but it sounds like a lot of cold calling and selling people materials from what I heard
Guys they are discussing WordPress security and how one is their previous companies had to wipe everything "because a baddie broke their WordPress and shit"
Read 28 tweets
Mar 26
Hello,

Are these your sandboxes leaking out information that allows attackers to visibly fingerprint your environment and evade analysis?

This 🧵is a deep dive into this method and why I find it relatively primitive yet, elegant & efficient as a sandbox system bypass.


Image
Image
Image
Image
For those watchful eyes, they might have noticed the leaked information in the above screenshot is XML format of the entire system settings.

How much settings? 118,000 bytes worth detailing everything from Hardware, Firmware, BIOS, manufacturers, PNP devices, printers etc.
This information comes from Microsoft Windows System Assessment Tool aka WinSAT. It has been implemented since Windows Vista and can be read all about here:



Usually this is achieved via executing the binary Winsat.exe but that isn't fun...learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/…
Read 17 tweets
Nov 30, 2023
PSA In the last week I have seen 3 examples of a relatively new strategy targeting telcos & iPhones of victims

With the increased measures against SIM Swapping, it seems attackers are switching over to 2 other methods to compromise phones

- Call Forwarding
- Parental Tools
Both attacks are similar in which attackers (likely related to Lazarus) are either social engineering telcos or using an insider at these companies to conduct these attacks.

In all of these cases it was leading up to ATO of iCloud and/or password managers
The call forwarding attack is relatively straight forward:

Attacker calls in telco and social engineers the operator to convince the agent to switch a line to call forwarding because of vacation.

The attacker then forwards the number to a VOIP number they control
Read 9 tweets
Mar 23, 2023
So for all my followers who are wondering why TikTok is being investigated and potentially banned is because of several reasons heres a 🧵

A. they used data from their app to geolocate whistleblower journalists and physically go to their location

B. They violated policy on data
Harvesting by using their inapp browser instead of the supplied mobile browser, this obtains much more data than what is normally collected and it's shady practices

C. They have repeatedly been caught using methods that get information using your phones gyroscope and other
Sensors on the phone in order to locate you and track your location even without geodata and tracking enabled

D. they have questionable ties to the Chinese government even when they deny it. This is the same group of people that hacked many sensitive data repositories and
Read 11 tweets
Mar 9, 2023
So I've been just been briefed on a very disturbing trend of events that I think everyone should know.

Ransomware attackers have been targeting legal firms quite heavily in the last 6 months or so.

I thought this was because pretty poor security, but there's much more.

A 🧵
A large portion of announced ransomware attacks have hit medium sized law firms very heavily, by some metrics close to 12% targeted are law offices

Just learned the attackers are also extorting the clients or pretending to be the law firm and asking for lawyer or retainer fees.
Attackers are also contacting individuals & are telling them they will anonymously send district attorneys, friend and family, or even in some cases the victims evidence & legal content that they have grabbed or otherwise pay to keep them quiet

Some cases are 10+ yrs old
Read 7 tweets

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