How Attackers are Taking Advantage of the Human Factor

2013 is well on its way to be another record year for cyber intrusions, keeping security as a topic in every corporation’s boardroom and in every government agency.

How many vulnerabilities did your security team find scanning today, last month, or this year? And how many were high risk? In the first six months of 2013, the IBM X-Force Research and Development team analyzed 4,100 new security vulnerabilities and 900 million new web pages and images.

The IBM X-Force team just released their Trend and Risk Report which summarizes their findings on emerging threats and the 2013 attack landscape. If you are a CIO, CEO, CISO or a line of business executive this must read report outlines the new attack opportunities in areas like:

Social media: how social media is a valuable tool for business, but is also being used by attackers for reconnaissance and launching attacks
Mobile device malware: how the explosive growth of Android devices is attracting malware authors
Poisoning the watering hole: how attackers are compromising a central strategic target and launching zero day exploits
Distraction and diversion: how attackers are amplifying Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks as a distraction to allow them to breach other systems
Old techniques, new success: how today’s security complexity can enable old gaps to be exploited

Read the latest research from IBM X-Force

Caleb Barlow

SoaPy: Stealthy enumeration of Active Directory environments through ADWS

10 min read - Introduction Over time, both targeted and large-scale enumeration of Active Directory (AD) environments have become increasingly detected due to modern defensive solutions. During our internship at X-Force Red this past summer, we noticed FalconForce’s SOAPHound was becoming popular for enumerating Active Directory environments. This tool brought a new perspective to Active Directory enumeration by performing collection via Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) instead of directly through Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as other AD enumeration tools had in the past.…

Smoltalk: RCE in open source agents

26 min read - Big shoutout to Hugging Face and the smolagents team for their cooperation and quick turnaround for a fix! Introduction Recently, I have been working on a side project to automate some pentest reconnaissance with AI agents. Just after I started this project, Hugging Face announced the release of smolagents, a lightweight framework for building AI agents that implements the methodology described in the ReAct paper, emphasizing reasoning through iterative decision-making. Interestingly, smolagents enables agents to reason and act by generating…

Being a good CLR host – Modernizing offensive .NET tradecraft

14 min read - The modern red team is defined by its ability to compromise endpoints and take actions to complete objectives. To achieve the former, many teams implement their own custom command-and-control (C2) or use an open-source option. For the latter, there is a constant stream of post-exploitation tooling being released that takes advantage of various features in Windows, Active Directory and third-party applications. The execution mechanism for this tooling has, for the last several years, relied heavily on executing .NET assemblies in…

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More from X-Force

SoaPy: Stealthy enumeration of Active Directory environments through ADWS

Smoltalk: RCE in open source agents

Being a good CLR host – Modernizing offensive .NET tradecraft

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