Ruler has become a go to tool for us on external engagements, easily turning compromised mailbox credentials into shells. This has resulted in security being pushed forward and Microsoft responding with patches for the two vectors used in Ruler, namely rules and forms. These were patched with KB3191938 and KB4011091 respectively. This puts us back into the cat and mouse game of attack versus defence, with attack needing to find a new vector.…
We’ve spent a lot of time creating Ruler and turning it into, what we think, is a useful attack tool. The goal behind the project was to highlight the command execution potential around weak credentials when combined with Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. That goal has largely been met, with the ability to now demonstrate that compromising user credentials can be much more than “just” reading email. Microsoft has also been…
Using MS Exchange and Outlook to get a foothold in an organisation, or to maintain persistence, has been a go to attack method for RedTeams lately. This attack has typically relied on using Outlook Rules to trigger the shell execution. Although Ruler makes accomplishing this really easy, it has, up until now, required a WebDAV server to host our shell/application. In most cases this is not an issue, but once…
Getting access to an internal network is always great, keeping this access can be a whole other challenge. At times we want to fly below the radar and ensure our access doesn’t get detected or blocked by traditional network based solutions. To this end, communicating directly through an Exchange server can be very beneficial and solve both challenges. Ruler provides us with a means of getting a shell on an internal network.…
We are taking Ruler and the abuse of Exchange on a road trip to Germany in March. Troopers have accepted our talk, “Ruler – Pivoting through Exchange” and we are looking forward to sharing the exciting extras that we’ve been building into Ruler, along with some secrets for using Exchange in your recon, exploitation and post-exploitation phases. https://www.troopers.de/events/troopers17/779_ruler_-_pivoting_through_exchange/ A while back I was asked (I think by @singe, but there…
01 September 2016
~7 min
By etienne
In December 2015 Silent Break Security wrote about “Malicious Outlook Rules” and using these to get a remote shell. This was great, we could now use those credentials found through brute-forcing OWA instances or a phishing page. The only issue I had with this was the fact that you needed to setup a local instance of the mailbox, which at times could be time consuming and also felt like overkill.…
Mobile assessments are always fun as the environment is constantly evolving. A recent trend has been the use of custom protocols for communication between the application and server. This holds particularly true for financial institutes who are aiming to protect both the confidentiality and integrity of data. Most of these custom protocols are over TCP, wrap data in custom crypto, which usually includes signing of the payload to prevent tampering.…
Picture this. Every year, a group of Plakkers (our nickname for those who work at SensePost) descended into Las Vegas with more luggage than Imelda Marcos on a shoe shopping spree. In recent years, our kit list was immense. 200+ laptops, 25 servers, screens, switches and more backup disks than one should ever carry past TSA. Often we got there days before Blackhat started and spent 24 hours making sure…
Every now and then you run into a new file format and you find that you may not have a tool to parse that file. Or you are looking for an easy to use solution for you mom to access the photo’s you sent her in a .tar archive. This is where file conversion services come in, a quick Google for “online file converter” will yield multiple results. One thing…
03 September 2015
~5 min
By etienne
The last week I was stuck on a web-app assessment where everything was new-age HTML5, with AngularJS and websockets. Apart from the login sequence, all communication happened through websockets. Now intercepting websockets can be done in Burp and you can modify the requests/responses as you wish. There were however multiple issues with this. Polling – the webapp did a ‘ping’ request and if this was held up (intercept in burp)…