In this lesson,
we're going to explore the concept
of Living off the Land Binaries,
commonly referred to as LOLBins.
Living off the Land Binaries
are legitimate, pre-installed tools
and utilities in the operating system that attackers
and penetration testers can leverage
to perform various actions without needing
to introduce external tools or malware.
Now, this approach helps avoid detection by security tools
as these binaries are trusted and often whitelisted.
Now, let's dive into a little scenario
to illustrate the use of LOLBins.
Now, imagine you're conducting a penetration test
for a healthcare organization, Dion HealthSecure.
Your goal is to assess their security posture
by exploiting the vulnerabilities
and gaining access to sensitive data.
During your initial phase on the compromised machine,
you want to avoid raising any alarms.
Using LOLBins, you can perform several tasks stealthily.
One task we want to do
is gather information with PowerShell.
Now, PowerShell, of course, is a powerful scripting language
and command-line interface available on Windows systems.
You can use it to gather information
about the target system.
For example, you can run
the following PowerShell Get-Process command.
Now, this command lists all running processes
and saves the output to a file,
which you can later exfiltrate.
If we want to get some external files into the system,
we'll use the bitsadmin.exe command.
BITSAdmin is a command-line tool
for managing the Background Intelligence Transfer Service
or BITS.
You can use this to download files from the Internet.
Here's an example command:
Now, this command simply downloads a file
from a remote server to the target machine.
Another thing we should think about is code execution
with regsvr32.
Regsvr32 is used to register and unregister DLLs
which are shared libraries in the Windows operating system.
It can be used to execute scripts hosted on a remote server.
Here's an example command of that.
Now, quickly glancing at this command,
it simply executes a remote script
using the regsvr32 command.
Another command that we can use is to schtasks.exe command.
Now, a schtasks is a tool
for managing scheduled tasks on Windows.
It can be used to create tasks that run
but we will need elevated privileges for this.
So here's an example of that command as well.
To sum this up, this command simply schedules a test
to run a malicious executable
with SYSTEM privileges upon user login.
All right, the last thing we will discuss
is data exfiltration with certutil.exe.
Certutil is a command-line utility
for managing certificates.
It can be used to encode and decode data,
which can help with data exfiltration.
Here's a few simple commands you can examine
just to see the general syntax.
Now, these commands simply encode a sensitive data file
and upload it to a remote server.
By using these LOLBins,
you can perform various actions on compromised systems
while minimizing the risk of detection.
However, it's important to understand
that these techniques are also used by malicious actors,
which is why organizations need
to implement robust monitoring
and alerting mechanisms to detect abnormal use
of legitimate tools.
So, remember, Living off the Land Binaries
are powerful tools in a pentester's arsenal.
By understanding and utilizing these native utilities,
you can conduct stealthy
and effective penetration tests
while evading traditional security measures.
Always ensure to conduct these tests ethically
and within an agreed upon scope of your engagement.