Affected staff say more than 100 employees working to protect U.S. government networks were ‘axed’ with no prior warning

I began my search for opportunities and stumbled upon a list of eligible websites for bug hunting at https://gist.github.com/R0X4R/81e6c50c091a20b060afe5c259b58cfa. This list became my starting…

Key Takeaways

• Nighthawk is an advanced C2 framework intended for red team operations through commercial licensing.
• Proofpoint researchers observed initial use of the framework in September 2022 by a likely red team.
• We have seen no indications at this time that leaked versions of Nighthawk are being used by attributed threat actors in the wild.
• The tool has a robust list of configurable evasion techniques that are referenced as “opsec” functions throughout its code.
  P* roofpoint researchers expect Nighthawk will show up in threat actor campaigns as the tool becomes more widely recognized or as threat actors search for new, more capable tools to use against targets.

During an internal assessment, I performed an NTLM relay and ended up owning the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account of the Windows server. Looking at the users connected on the same server, I knew that a domain administrator account was connected. All I had to do to compromise the domain, was compromise the account. This could be achieved by dumping the memory of the LSASS process and collecting their credentials or Kerberos TGT’s. Seemed easy until I realised an EDR was installed on the system. Long story short, I ended up compromising the domain admin account without touching the LSASS process. To do so, I relied on an internal Windows mechanism called token manipulation.

The goal of this blog post is to present how I did it. We will see what access tokens are, what they are used for, how we can manipulate them to usurp legitimate accounts without touching LSASS and finally I will present a tool and a CrackMapExec module that can be used during such assessments. All the source code, binaries and CrackMapExec module can be found here https://github.com/sensepost/impersonate.

Unit 42 continuously hunts for new and unique malware samples that match known advanced persistent threat (APT) patterns and tactics. On May 19, one such sample was uploaded to VirusTotal, where it received a benign verdict from all 56 vendors that evaluated it. Beyond the obvious detection concerns, we believe this sample is also significant in terms of its malicious payload, command and control (C2), and packaging.

At Grapl we believe that in order to build the best defensive system we need to deeply understand attacker behaviors. As part of that goal we're investing in offensive security research. Keep up with our blog for new research on high risk vulnerabilities, exploitation, and advanced threat tactics.