Book Image

Cybersecurity Attacks – Red Team Strategies

By : Johann Rehberger
Book Image

Cybersecurity Attacks – Red Team Strategies

By: Johann Rehberger

Overview of this book

It's now more important than ever for organizations to be ready to detect and respond to security events and breaches. Preventive measures alone are not enough for dealing with adversaries. A well-rounded prevention, detection, and response program is required. This book will guide you through the stages of building a red team program, including strategies and homefield advantage opportunities to boost security. The book starts by guiding you through establishing, managing, and measuring a red team program, including effective ways for sharing results and findings to raise awareness. Gradually, you'll learn about progressive operations such as cryptocurrency mining, focused privacy testing, targeting telemetry, and even blue team tooling. Later, you'll discover knowledge graphs and how to build them, then become well-versed with basic to advanced techniques related to hunting for credentials, and learn to automate Microsoft Office and browsers to your advantage. Finally, you'll get to grips with protecting assets using decoys, auditing, and alerting with examples for major operating systems. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build, manage, and measure a red team program effectively and be well-versed with the fundamental operational techniques required to enhance your existing skills.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Embracing the Red
6
Section 2: Tactics and Techniques

Chapter 9: Powerful Automation

In this chapter, we will explore automation techniques, focusing first on COM and Windows and then web browsers. We will use the Component Object Model (COM) to automate Outlook, Word, and Excel. Furthermore, we will show you how to automate and entirely remote-control web browsers across operating systems. To understand how to leverage the power of COM, we'll look at the basics and how to create COM objects and invoke their functionality with a few practical examples. So, let's get started.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding COM automation on Windows and how it can be used to automate tasks such as sending emails with Microsoft Office
  • Achieving red teaming objectives by automating Microsoft Word and Excel
  • Automating and remote controlling web browsers as an adversarial tactic