Today we all constantly read about data breaches that could have been prevented if the impacted organization had just done what they were supposed to do. The unfortunate reality is that cyberattacks are now a matter of 'when' and not 'if' for the average enterprise. Yet the landscape is changing and protecting your environment is actually getting more challenging not less.
Cyber adversaries are more organized and talented than ever, so an effective cyber defense now requires more than just following the right processes. Today's enterprises need defenders who perform their jobs with an adversarial mindset. While this need is becoming more acute every day, we are also presently in the midst of an enormous cybersecurity skills shortage. These two forces are diametrically opposed and there is only one way toward resolution – practical security training.
This being the case, I couldn't be happier to join Offensive Security as the company's next CEO.
Offensive Security is delighted to announce the complete redesign of The Exploit Database (EDB), making it easier and faster than ever to find the data you need and presenting it to you in a responsive dashboard layout.
When we started out with our online training courses over 12 years ago, we made hard choices about the nature of our courses and certifications. We went against the grain, against the common certification standards, and came up with a unique certification model in the field - "Hands-on, practical certification". Twelve years later, these choices have paid off. The industry as a whole has realized that most of the multiple choice, technical certifications do not necessarily guarantee a candidate's technical level...and for many in the offensive security field, the OSCP has turned into a golden industry standard. This has been wonderful for certification holders as they find themselves actively recruited by employers due to the fact that they have proven themselves as being able to stand up to the stress of a hard, 24-hour exam - and still deliver a quality report.
Some time ago, we noticed some security researchers looking for critical vulnerabilities affecting "security" based products (such as antivirus) that can have a damaging impact to enterprise and desktop users. Take a stroll through the Google Project Zero bug tracker to see what we mean.
A few months ago, we decided to make a new module for our Advanced Windows Exploitation class. After evaluating a few options we chose to work with an Adobe Flash 1day vulnerability originally discovered by the Google Project Zero team. Since we did not have any previous experience with Flash internals, we expected a pretty steep learning curve.
Admittedly, somewhat of a click-bait blog post title - but bear with us, it's for a good reason. Lots of work goes on behind the scenes of Kali Linux, tools get updated every day and interesting new features are added constantly. Most of these tool updates and feature additions go unannounced, and are then discovered by inquisitive users - however this time, we had to make an exception.
Managing the Exploit Database is one of those ongoing tasks that ends up taking a significant amount of time and often, we don't take the time to step back and look at the trends as they occur over time. Have there been more exploits over the years? Perhaps fewer? Is there a shift in platforms being targeted? Has the bar for exploits indeed been raised with the increase in more secure operating system protections?
In our recent blog post "What it means to be an OSCP" we asked OSCPs to share their experience of what it means to have earned this certification and we received many tales of hardship and reward. Mike Benich sent in an entry that we felt very much captured the essence of the Offensive Security mentality; that the path to OSCP is challenging, stressful, and demanding, but the results leave you with much more than technological expertise.
The time has come for yet another Kali ARM image release with new and updated images. Our collection of supported ARM hardware grows constantly with new images from Raspberry Pi 3, Banana Pi and Odroid-C2, with the latter being our first real arm64 image. We're really excited about our new arm64 build environment and hope to see more 64bit ARM devices running Kali in the future. Feel free to visit our Kali Linux ARM downloads page to get the latest goodness.
A while back we introduced the idea of Kali Linux Customization by demonstrating the Kali Linux ISO of Doom. Our scenario covered the installation of a custom Kali configuration which contained select tools required for a remote vulnerability assessment. The customised Kali ISO would undergo an unattended autoinstall in a remote client site, and automatically connect back to our OpenVPN server over TCP port 443. The OpenVPN connection would then bridge the remote and local networks, allowing us full "layer 3" access to the internal network from our remote location. The resulting custom ISO could then be sent to the client who would just pop it into a virtual machine template, and the whole setup would happen automagically with no intervention - as depicted in the image below.
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