2014 | OffSec

Happy Holidays from Offsec

We at Offensive Security would like to thank all of our students, customers, and friends for a wonderful 2014. Its been a busy but productive year, with major upgrades to Kali Linux, the release of Kali NetHunter, the public launch of the hosted virtual labs, the first ever Kali Linux Dojo, upgrades to our student labs, lots of interesting R&D, a bunch of 0-days and a number of other accomplishments. We enjoyed the journey with all of you and here is to a fun and productive 2015! We wanted to thank you with this video we produced for all y’all.

Professional Penetration Testing Labs

For the past few months, we have been quietly beta testing and perfecting our new Enterprise Penetration Testing Labs, or as we fondly call it, the “Offensive Security Proving Grounds (PG)”. Today, we are proud to unveil our hosted penetration testing labs – a safe virtual network environment designed to be attacked and penetrated as a means of learning and sharpening your penetration testing skills. The new design of the Proving Grounds include multiple interconnected subnets with a wide array of modern operating systems, including Active Directory domains, Citrix systems, corporate Antivirus solutions as well as Intrusion Prevention Systems which attackers must learn to cope with.

Bypassing Windows and OSX Logins with NetHunter & Kon-boot

The Kali Linux NetHunter platform has many hidden features which we still haven’t brought to light. One of them is the DriveDroid application and patch set, which have been implemented in NetHunter since v1.0.2. This tool allows us to have NetHunter emulate a bootable ISO or USB, using images of our choosing. That’s right, you can use NetHunter as a boot device which holds a library of bootable ISOs and images…And so we begin:

Kali with Raspberry Pi TFT support

Several weeks ago a request in the Kali forums prompted us to look at the integration of the Adafruit 2.8in TFT touch screen for Kali Linux. A few weeks and much less hair later, we are happy to announce the availability of this image in our Offensive Security custom Kali images section.

Disarming and Bypassing EMET 5.1

Last week Microsoft released EMET 5.1 to address some compatibility issues and strengthen mitigations to make them more resilient to attacks and bypasses. We, of course, were curious to see if our EMET 5.0 disarming technique has been addressed by the latest version of the toolkit.

Kali Nexus NetHunter 1.0.2

It’s been a week since our release of the Kali Linux NetHunter, and the feedback is amazing. A NetHunter community has sprung up from nowhere, and the forums and github pages are really active. We’re completely stoked about this community response, and are eager to see it grow. After an intense week of community testing and a slew of bugfixes (including shellshock), we thought it would be a good opportunity to release a NetHunter update. Please welcome NetHunter 1.0.2.

Disarming EMET v5.0

In our previous Disarming Emet 4.x blog post, we demonstrated how to disarm the ROP mitigations introduced in EMET 4.x by abusing a global variable in the .data section located at a static offset. A general overview of the EMET 5 technical preview has been recently published here.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 0day

In a recent engagement, we had the opportunity to audit a leading Antivirus Endpoint Protection solution, where we found a multitude of vulnerabilities. Some of these made it to CERT, while others have been scheduled for review during our upcoming AWE course at Black Hat 2014, Las Vegas. Ironically, the same software that was meant to protect the organization under review was the reason for its compromise.

Disarming Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET)

With the emergence of recent Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities, we’ve been seeing a trend of EMET recommendations as a path to increasing application security. A layered defense is always helpful as it increases the obstacles in the path of an attacker. However, we were wondering how much does it really benefit? How much harder does an attacker have to work to bypass these additional protections? With that in mind, we started a deep dive into EMET.

Kali Linux Evil Wireless Access Point

A few days ago, we had the opportunity to deploy a rogue access point that would steal user credentials using a fake, captive web portal, and provide MITM’d Internet services via 3G. We needed reliability and scalability in our environment as there would potentially be a large amount of, erm….”participants” in this wireless network. We were pretty happy with the result and quickly realized that we had created a new “Kali Linux recipe”. Or in other words, we could create a custom, bootable wireless evil access point image, which could do all sorts of wondrous things.

Announcing the Kali Linux Dojo

For the past 6 months, we’ve been busy silently developing an advanced Kali Linux course the likes of which has not yet been seen in the industry. This set of in-depth, practical workshops focuses on the Kali operating system itself, demonstrating some of its advanced features and use-cases by its developers. As with all “Offensive Security” training, this workshop is intensive, educational, and addictively engaging. If you’ve ever wished for fluent proficiency with Kali Linux, this workshop is for you.

Kali Encrypted USB Persistence

A couple of days ago, we added an awesome new feature to Kali allowing users to set up a Live Kali USB with encrypted persistence. What this means is that you can now set up a bootable Kali USB drive allowing you to either boot to a “clean” Kali image or alternatively, overlay it with the contents of a persistent encrypted partition, allowing you to securely save your changes on the USB drive between reboots. If you add our LUKS nuke feature into this mix together with a 32GB USB 3.0 thumb drive, you’ve got yourself a fast, versatile and secure “Penetration Testing Travel Kit”.

Kali Linux Recipes

A couple of days ago, we received an e-mail from a university professor asking for advice regarding Linux distributions to be used in his security 101 classes. In its default configuration, Kali Linux wasn’t a 100% match for his needs, which were quite specific:

Kali Linux Trademarks

It’s been a year since we’ve released Kali Linux, and we’re happy to see it succeed. Kali has surpassed BackTrack Linux in many ways and the community is responding accordingly. Between the improved development cycle, more attentive support, and larger community, Kali Linux has reached new heights of popularity. This popularity however, does not come without its own issues. One of the big problems we’ve been facing in the past year is rampant violations of our Kali Linux Trademarks.

Generating Kali Raspberry Pi Images

“Kali Linux Raspberry Pi Image Updated!” That was supposed to be the “tweet” we would release, telling everyone our new Kali Linux Raspberry Pi image was supposedly better than our old one. We often update our followers with news like this on twitter, and this tweet would be no different. However, this time, we thought it would be interesting to tell you about the mechanics of updates like these, and shed some light on how these “news items” come about. This post will also give us the opportunity to describe the process of running our custom Kali Linux ARM build scripts, by way of a story. If you couldn’t care less about this story, and just want the updated image – head straight to our Kali Linux Custom Image page!

Exploit Database Hosted on GitHub

We have recently completed some renovations on the Exploit Database backend systems and moved the EDB exploit repository to Github. This means that it’s now easier than ever to copy, clone or fork the whole repository. The previous SVN CVS has been retired.