Research Blog

Executive Summary NCC Group is pleased to open source a new tool built to help Red Teams log their activity for later correlation with the Blue Team’s own logging. What started as a simple internal web based data-collection tool has grown to integrate with Cobalt Strike and BloodHound to improve the accuracy and ease of […]

System Management Interrupts (SMI) provide a mechanism for entering System Management Mode (SMM) which primarily implements platform-specific functions related to power management. SMM is a privileged execution mode with access to the complete physical memory of the system, and to which the operating system has no visibility. This makes the code running in SMM an […]

We are excited to announce the addition of a new provider in our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on GitHub)! In April, we received a remarkable pull request from Asif Wani, Product Security Lead at DigitalOcean APAC, to integrate DigitalOcean services into ScoutSuite. After reviewing the request, NCC Group not only accepted his proposal, but […]

Let’s kick this off with some examples. Here’s a seamless loop illustrating CBC-mode encryption: Here’s a clip showing a code block being rewritten to avoid leaking padding information in error messages: Here’s an illustration of a block cipher operating in CTS mode: You may be surprised to learn that each of these illustrations was generated […]

Introduction In late 2023 and early 2024, the NCC Group Hardware and Embedded Systems practice undertook an engagement to reverse engineer baseband firmware on several smartphones. This included MediaTek 5G baseband firmware based on the nanoMIPS architecture. While we were aware of some nanoMIPS modules for Ghidra having been developed in private, there was no […]

Author: Axel Boesenach and Erik Schamper In this blog post we will go into a user-friendly memory scanning Python library that was created out of the necessity of having more control during memory scanning. We will give an overview of how this library works, share the thought process and the why’s. This blog post will […]

Overview Android 14 introduced a new feature which allows to remotely install CA certificates. This change implies that instead of using the /system/etc/security/cacerts directory to check the trusted CA’s, this new feature uses the com.android.conscrypt APEX module, and reads the certificates from the directory /apex/com.android.conscrypt/cacerts. Inspired by this blog post by Tim Perry, I decided to create a […]

Cartographer is a Ghidra plugin that creates a visual “map” of code coverage data, enabling researchers to easily see what parts of a program are executed. It has a wide range of uses, such as better understanding a program, honing in on target functionality, or even discovering unused content in video games.

We are excited to announce the release of a new version of our open-source, multi-cloud auditing tool ScoutSuite (on GitHub)! This version includes multiple new rules and findings for Azure, which align with some of the latest CIS Benchmark checks, multiple bug fixes and feature enhancements, and minor finding template corrections. Supported Python versions have […]

TL;DR – 31 usernames extracted vs 13 from the next leading brand! Introduction Open Source Intelligence Gathering (OSINT) can be an activity in itself and can also form a solid foundation for Full Spectrum Attack Simulations. Getting an idea of username formats as well as a number of known usernames increases the chances of success […]