Offensive Security Online Training & Pentesting Blog

Disarming Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET)

July 1, 2014

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

June 10, 2014

Kali Linux

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

May 28, 2014

Kali Linux

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

May 27, 2014

Kali Linux

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

April 23, 2014

Kali Linux

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

March 17, 2014

Kali Linux

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

January 27, 2014

Kali Linux

“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

January 7, 2014

Offensive Security

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.

Bug Bounty Program Insights

December 23, 2013

Offensive Security

With the nature of our business, we at Offensive Security take our system security very seriously and we appreciate the benefits of having “the crowd” scrutinize our internet presence for bugs. For this reason, we recently started our own Bug Bounty Program, which provides incentives for researchers to inform us of possible vulnerabilities in our sites in exchange for cash rewards.

Penetration Testing with Kali Linux – Online Course Update

December 19, 2013

Offensive Security

Over a year ago, when we first sat down and began on what would become Kali Linux, we realized that with all the major changes, we would also need to update our flagship course, Penetration Testing with BackTrack (PWB), to be inline with Kali Linux. With the release of Kali, we ensured that we mentioned the impact this would have on PWB and that an update to the course was in the works.

NDPROXY Local SYSTEM exploit CVE-2013-5065

December 4, 2013

Exploit Development

In the past few days there has been some online chatter about a new Windows XP/2k3 privilege escalation, well documented by FireEye. Googling around, we came across a Twitter message which contained a link to a Chinese vulnerability analysis and PoC.

BlackHat Seattle, Pentesting with Kali Linux!

Penetration Testing with Kali Linux at Black Hat Seattle Dec 9th-12th

September 17, 2013

Offensive Security

We are proud to announce that we will be teaching Penetration Testing with Kali Linux at Black Hat’s December event in Seattle Washington. This will be the second time we will be teaching this class live.

Penetration Test Report 2013

September 3, 2013

Offensive Security

We are proud to release a new, updated, sample penetration test report. This report accurately reflects the types of assessments we conduct for our clients. It incorporates changes we have made over the last two years based on customer feedback, as well as reflecting many of the types of attacks we have found to be effective in multiple customer environments.

Kali Linux ISO of Doom

August 27, 2013

Kali Linux

In our last blog post, we provided an example of running an unattended network installation of Kali Linux. Our scenario covered the installation of a custom Kali configuration which contained select tools required for a remote vulnerability assessment using OpenVAS and the Metasploit Framework.

Kali Linux Unattended PXE Install

August 12, 2013

Kali Linux

Our last blog post on the Kali Linux site discussed implementing some cool scenarios with Kali Linux, such as remote unattended installations, creating custom Kali Linux ISOS, and getting Kali working on funky ARM hardware. We received several emails from people asking for more information on how to implement these scenarios, so we thought we’d make a few blog posts with more detailed examples.