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Insights and research from our global cybersecurity team.

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Detecting Mimikatz with Busylight

In 2015 Raphael Mudge released an article [1] that detailed that versions of mimikatz released after 8th of October, 2015 had a new module that was utilising certain types of external USB devices to flash lights in different colours if mimikatz was executed. The technique presented in the article required certain kind of busylights that […]


Technical Advisory – NULL Pointer Derefence in McAfee Drive Encryption (CVE-2021-23893)

Summary McAfee’s Complete Data Protection package contained the Drive Encryption (DE) software. This software was used to transparently encrypt the drive contents. The versions prior to 7.3.0 HF1 had a vulnerability in the kernel driver MfeEpePC.sys that could be exploited on certain Windows systems for privilege escalation or DoS. Impact Privilege Escalation vulnerability in a […]


Tool Release – Socks Over RDP Now Works With Citrix

Introduction A month ago, we released a new tool that made it possible to tunnel traffic over an existing Remote Desktop Connection without the need to alter the configuration of the environment. This tool enables penetration testers to conduct their assessments over Windows-based jump boxes. Remote Access technologies are quite diversified, although Remote Desktop Services […]


Shell Arithmetic Expansion and Evaluation Abuse

Introduction Recently we came across a class of vulnerability that was discovered some time ago yet is not very well known, despite the potential impact of its discovery and exploitation being critical. During the (re)discovery of this type of bug we managed to get a privileged shell on a Linux-based appliance that only presented a […]


Tool Release – Socks Over RDP

Introduction Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is used to create an interactive session on a remote Windows machine. This is a widely used protocol mostly used by Administrators to remotely access the resources of the operating system or network based services. As penetration testers we frequently find ourselves in a situation where the only access that […]


Owning the Virgin Media Hub 3.0: The perfect place for a backdoor

All of this research was performed by our Managing Security Consultant, Balazs Bucsay @xoreipeip (https://twitter.com/xoreipeip) during the winter of 2016/2017. After changing Internet provider at my home in 2016, I received a new broadband modem; the Virgin Media Hub 3.0. Somehow I always get this itchy feeling whenever a new device is connected to my network and […]


How I did not get a shell

This is a story about a penetration test, where it was not possible to get a shell on a target device. We pentesters love to think that getting a shell is the goal of a penetration test and this story shows how frustrating it can sometimes be when trying to get to root. Of course, […]