Embrace The Red

Many Windows applications and services are implemented using an automation infrastructure called Component Object Model (COM). COM has been around for decades and its useful for programming, sharing of code at binary level, usage from scripting languages, and well, red teaming. Wide Usage of Component Object Model Many products are implemented as COM objects, including Microsoft Office. Using PowerShell (or other languages) COM objects can be created to fully automate applications and services.

Until the Apple Airtag came out a few months ago I hadn’t really looked into the tag tracking market. Turns out there were already quite a lot of offerings available before Apple joined the market, most notably Tile. However, I wanted to try out the Airtag and ended up ordering a few. This post will explore three things: Removing the speaker of my Airtag Using Browser APIs to scan for Airtags (if you don’t have an iPhone but someone tries to stalk you this might be handy) Explore data exfiltration via Airtags and Apple’s “Find My” network By the way, when you order your Airtags online you can customize them.

This rather lengthy post goes into reasons for having an offensive security program and in particular, on how a red team can help improve the immune system of your organization. This is the high-level outline of the post: Security breaches cannot be entirely prevented Implications of a breach Automated malware can hit your organization at any time Security investments - run as fast as you can, just to stay in place The immune system of your organization Embracing the red With regular cadence companies are compromised and suffer breaches.

Recently Google’s FLoC proposal has been making the rounds in the news. FLoC stands for “federated learning of cohorts” and is Google’s vision how to perform user profiling in Chrome going forward. Currently user tracking and profiling happens (mostly) via cookies, but many browser vendors have been supportive of protection of their users and started blocking third party and tracking cookies - or at least offer features in their browser to enable blocking.

A nifty way for adversaries to acquire passwords during post-exploitation is to spoof credential dialogs and perform a local phishing attack. This means tricking a user on a compromised computer to enter their password. Unfortunately, users are conditioned to enter their credentials frequently and therefore don’t question random passwords prompts too much. Long, long time ago… but nothing has changed The idea to spoof a credential dialog is one of the most simple ideas one might come up with.

You probably heard of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). They are receiving a lot of interest over the last several months. I did some digging and realized that there are some bigger issues with the standards and various interpretations and implementations of it, and how centralized many offerings are. What is an NFT The idea behind it is simple, use a blockchain (and cryptography) to assign and be able to proof ownership over a specific piece of digital content.

Next week (on March, 9th 2021) I will be speaking at the Hong Kong Information Security Summit 2021. 歡迎, 你好! I was invited to share my thoughts around protecting the modern (and remote) workplace. Of course, my talk is addressing this topic from a red teaming point of view. Conference details are here. The adversary will come to your house The name of the talk is “Red Team Strategies for Helping Protect the Modern Workplace” which might seem less creative, but there is some (hopefullly) good and interesting information in my talk.

The other day I read this blog post about “The Death of Manual Red Teams” and I thought I’d take a moment to comment on it to provide an alternative perspective. In my opinion the premise of the blog post is backwards, highlighting a lack of understanding of what red teaming is about. For instance the following sentence in the post seems quite incorrect: “Red teaming is the process of using existing, already known security bugs and vulnerabilities to hack a system.

The Kindle (ebook) edition of “Cybersecurity Attacks - Red Team Strategies” is currently free on Amazon. Grab your copy while it lasts and spread the word!

The other day Microsoft published a great deep dive around the second stage payloads and hands-on hacking activities of the Solarwinds/Sunburst incidents that where uncovered late 2020. One thing that is so interesting is the use of off the shelve Cobalt Strike tooling and templates for command & control. After doing all the hard work and customization to seamlessly backdoor binaries the adversaries sem to use Cobalt Strike. Intel for Red Teamers Although, they did add customizations with some interesting features, which are interesting for red teamers to be aware of.

Survivorship bias is an interesting thing that we can observe nearly daily. It is the success stories of exponentially growing startups, the motivational speaker who shares their insights on how to be successful and so forth. What is it exactly? What is survivorship bias? Wikipedia defines it as “…the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.

Security metrics are an interesting topic. Over the years I used “scores” as a tool to identify and shine light on problematic areas or highlight lack of engineering and security quality of certain teams. A security score should not seen as an objective or absoulte measure, but it allows to compare systems with each other at a relative scale, and by sharing the score it makes people ask questions. I have seen showing management ask vivid questions when they see a chart with their service and a score next to it:

Today FireEye shared that they were victim of a cyberattack and internal red teaming tooling was accessed by adversaries. More details in this NYT article. This reminded me that I wanted to do a post on actively protecting pen testers and pen testing assets for a while. Against persistent adversaries it is only a matter of time when they succeed, not if they will succeed. The big question is do you know when an adversary starts poking around, and when they succeed?

What a journey it has been. I wrote quite a bit about machine learning from a red teaming/security testing perspective this year. It was brought to my attention to provide a conveninent “index page” with all Husky AI and related blog posts. Here it is. Machine Learning Basics and Building Husky AI Getting the hang of machine learning The machine learning pipeline and attacks Husky AI: Building a machine learning system MLOps - Operationalizing the machine learning model Threat Modeling and Strategies Threat modeling a machine learning system Grayhat Red Team Village Video: Building and breaking a machine learning system Assume Bias and Responsible AI Practical Attacks and Defenses Brute forcing images to find incorrect predictions Smart brute forcing Perturbations to misclassify existing images Adversarial Robustness Toolbox Basics Image Scaling Attacks Stealing a model file: Attacker gains read access to the model Backdooring models: Attacker modifies persisted model file Repudiation Threat and Auditing: Catching modifications and unauthorized access Attacker modifies Jupyter Notebook file to insert a backdoor CVE 2020-16977: VS Code Python Extension Remote Code Execution Using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create fake husky images Using Microsoft Counterfit to create adversarial examples Backdooring Pickle Files Backdooring Keras Model Files and How to Detect It Miscellaneous Participating in the Microsoft Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition - Bypassing malware models by signing binaries Husky AI Github Repo Conclusion As you can see there are many machine learning specific attacks, but also a lot of “typical” red teaming techniques that put AI/ML systems at risk.

In this post we will explore Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create fake husky images. The goal is, of course, to have “Husky AI” misclassify them as real huskies. If you want to learn more about Husky AI visit the Overview post. Generative Adversarial Networks One of the attacks I wanted to investigate for a while was the creation of fake images to trick Husky AI. The best approach seemed by using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

There are plenty of examples of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems that made it into the news because of biased predictions and failures. Here are a few examples on AI/ML gone wrong: Amazon had an AI recruiting tool which favored men over women for technical jobs The Microsoft chat bot named “Tay” which turned racist and sexist rather quickly A doctor at the Jupiter Hospital in Florida referred to IBM’s AI system for helping recommend cancer treatments as “a piece of sh*t” Facebook’s AI got someone arrested for incorrectly translating text The list of AI failures goes on…

You might have heard about “NAT Slipstreaming” by Samy Kamkar. It’s an amazing technique that allows punching a hole in your routers firewall by just visiting a website. The attack depends on the router having the Application Layer Gateway enabled. This gateway can be used by anyone inside your network to open a firewall port (totally by design). Protocols such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) use it. What I will focus on in this post is the Application Layer Gateway (ALG) and SIP.

This post is part of a series about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Click on the blog tag “huskyai” to see related posts. Overview: How Husky AI was built, threat modeled and operationalized Attacks: The attacks I want to investigate, learn about, and try out In this post we are going to look at the “Repudiation Threat”, which is one of the threats often overlooked when performing threat modeling, and maybe something you would not even expect in a series about machine learning.

My GrayHat Red Team Village talk “Learning by doing: Building and breaking a machine learning system” is now live on YouTube. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SV80sIBhqY and smash the Like button! :D Question? I thought of turning the content into a hands-on workshop. Let me know if that would be something that would you would attend? Trying to see if there is interest. Cheers, Johann Twitter: @wunderwuzzi23

This post is part of a series about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Click on the blog tag “huskyai” to see related posts. Overview: How Husky AI was built, threat modeled and operationalized Attacks: Some of the attacks I want to investigate, learn about, and try out A few weeks ago while preparing demos for my GrayHat 2020 - Red Team Village presentation I ran across “Image Scaling Attacks” in Adversarial Preprocessing: Understanding and Preventing Image-Scaling Attacks in Machine Learning by Erwin Quiring, et al.