Three months have elapsed since the Empire 1.4 release, and we have some awesome new features for our next release! The notes for Empire 1.5 are below, but a quick warning- this release modifies part of the backend database schema, so do not apply this update if you have existing agents on your Empire server. You will need …
A friend (@piffd0s) recently ran into a specific situation I hadn’t encountered before: the domain controllers and domain admins of the environment he was assessing were extremely locked down, but he was able to determine that a few users had edit rights on a few specific group policy objects (GPOs). After a bit of back and forth, …
I’ve found that one of the most useful features of PowerView (outside of its user hunting capabilities) is its ability to enumerate local group membership on remote machines. I’ve spoken about this briefly before, and gave some details on its utilization of the ADSI WinNT Provider in the “Pass-the-Hash is Dead: Long Live Pass-the-Hash” post. My colleague @sixdub …
I’m taking a quick break from our Empire series to bring you something my ATD teammate Matt Nelson and myself have been working on over the last month or so- a project called PowerSCCM. This is the first primarily defensive-oriented post I’ve published, but fear not, more offensive material is in the hopper ;) Using Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) for …
This post is part of the ‘Empire Series’ with some background and an ongoing list of series posts [kept here]. Recently, an Empire user requested that we build a ‘standalone payload generator’, similar to msfvenom’s functionality. The motivation is to provide a scriptable capability that makes integration with other tools relatively easy. This short post will cover …
This post is part of the ‘Empire Series’ with some background and an ongoing list of series posts [kept here]. Code execution is great and remote control is awesome, but if you don’t have a persistence strategy planned nothing can throw a wrench in your engagement like an unplanned reboot or user logout. This post covers 17 current Empire persistence …
The “Empire Series”: 1/21/16 – Expanding Your Empire 1/28/16 – An Empire Case Study 2/4/16 – Nothing Lasts Forever: Persistence with Empire 2/11/16 – Empire & Tool Diversity: Integration is Key 2/25/16 – Empire’s CLI 3/15/16 – Phishing With Empire 3/31/16 – Empire 1.5 4/5/16 – Empire’s RESTful API [Note: This has been cross posted on …
It’s been another two months since the last major Empire point release, and development has continued to move along steadily. Empire has a TON of new modules from 10 different authors and a smattering of additional bug fixes/feature adds. We want to give a big thanks and shout out to all the contributors who are helping to …
Following my pattern of weaponizing Sean Metcalf‘s work in PowerView, I’m here with another update. Sean recently released a post titled “Dump Clear-Text Passwords for All Admins in the Domain Using Mimikatz DCSync“. He describes a legacy feature for Active Directory user accounts called ‘reversible encryption’. According to Microsoft, “This policy is required when using Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol …
A little over a week ago an interesting conversation started on security.stackexchange.com where someone asked about “Metasploit Meterpreter alternatives“. In the ensuing discussion two projects I co-founded and worked on heavily (Veil-Evasion and Empire) were mentioned, so I wanted to throw my .02 into the conversation. Empire was not designed as, not is intended to be, a …
