Research and Development

Windows

By way of an introduction to our talk at Black Hat Europe, Security Advisory EMEAR would like to share the background on our recent research into some common Active Directory integration solutions. Just as with Windows, these solutions can be utilized to join UNIX infrastructure to enterprises’ Active Directory forests. Continue reading

If BuzzFeed ran an article titled “26 Security Features You Probably Shouldn’t Enforce From Usermode”, this one would almost certainly make the list. But, for whatever reason, I thought it would be a fun learning experience to try to enforce a W^X memory policy from usermode. Some of you are probably asking what the heck a W^X policy is in the first place, and I’m terrible at thinking of ways to start blog posts (case in point: this paragraph), so I guess we’ll start out there. Continue reading

Lateral Movement is a method used by attackers (or malware) against a network Domain. After an initial device is compromised (typically, a user’s workstation), the attacker extracts passwords from memory, or obtains encrypted password hashes from the system for cracking or direct use (i.e. Pass the Hash). The attacker then attempts to login to other systems using those credentials to search for cached passwords of privileged Domain accounts. Usually, the local Administrator account is targeted as the password is often the same on all systems (due to the common practice of deploying systems from a master image), but service accounts, etc. can also be targeted. Continue reading

Inter Process Communication (IPC) is an ubiquitous part of modern computing. Processes often talk to each other and many software packages contain multiple components which need to exchange data to run properly. Named pipes are one of the many forms of IPC in use today and are extensively used on the Windows platform as a means to exchange data between running processes in a semi-persistent manner. Continue reading