Entries by Nick Aliferopoulos

XWizard: From XML to ShellExec Using Wizardry

Intro Red Teaming in the day and age of EDRs often involves finding niche and obscure ways, to perform actions usually under specific constraints, or as we call them internally, bypass primitives. While hunting for such primitives, an interesting small ecosystem became the center of attention for further research, that of XWizard. It should be […]

A Native Application Subsystem Backdoor

What is a Native Application? Most Windows applications come in two "flavors", GUI and console (command-line) applications. There are a few differences between the two, most notably the Windows Subsystem on top of which they are executed. The Subsystem can be seen by examining an executable's PE header: There are actually quite a few Subsystem […]

Treading carefully in Share Enumeration

Wherever there's Windows in corporate environments, there are Windows File (SMB) Shares. More often than not, during Adversary Simulation exercises operators need to enumerate which shares exist on which hosts, who can read and/or write to them, what files they contain, etc. Scenarios often arise that may even involve enumerating shares to write to them, […]

From traditional to templated malware

This is a follow-up article to Introducing Blueprint which was released to accompany our malware templating tool, Blueprint. The goal of this article is to provide a small but concise use case, demonstrating the effectiveness of templating in malware development and how you can port your own "traditional" malware to templated ones, leveraging the sinister […]