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The Development of a Telco Attack Testing Tool

This blog details the requirement for testing Telecom networks and one of the tools developed in house to facilitate this testing. Why? Telecoms security has always been an afterthought when the first mobile networks were developed and deployed into the wild.  Telecoms security has faced numerous challenges, leading to concerns about its effectiveness.  Several key […]


Unmasking Lorenz Ransomware: A Dive into Recent Tactics, Techniques and Procedures 

Author: Zaid Baksh In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, ransomware remains a persistent menace, with groups like Lorenz actively exploiting vulnerabilities in small to medium businesses globally. Since early 2021, Lorenz has been employing double-extortion tactics, exfiltrating sensitive data before encrypting systems and threatening to sell or release it publicly unless a ransom is […]


Reverse, Reveal, Recover: Windows Defender Quarantine Forensics

Max Groot and Erik Schamper TL;DR Introduction During incident response engagements we often encounter antivirus applications that have rightfully triggered on malicious software that was deployed by threat actors. Most commonly we encounter this for Windows Defender, the antivirus solution that is shipped by default with Microsoft Windows. Windows Defender places malicious files in quarantine […]


Post-exploiting a compromised etcd – Full control over the cluster and its nodes

Kubernetes is essentially a framework of various services that make up its typical architecture, which can be divided into two roles: the control-plane, which serves as a central control hub and hosts most of the components, and the nodes or workers, where containers and their respective workloads are executed. Within the control plane we typically […]


From ERMAC to Hook: Investigating the technical differences between two Android malware variants

Authored by Joshua Kamp (main author) and Alberto Segura. Summary Hook and ERMAC are Android based malware families that are both advertised by the actor named “DukeEugene”. Hook is the latest variant to be released by this actor and was first announced at the start of 2023. In this announcement, the actor claims that Hook […]


OffensiveCon 2023 – Exploit Engineering – Attacking the Linux Kernel

Cedric Halbronn and Alex Plaskett presented at OffensiveCon on the 19th of May 2023 on Exploit Engineering – Attacking the Linux kernel. Slides The slides for the talk can be downloaded below: libslub libslub can be downloaded from here. Abstract The abstract for the talk was as follows: Over the last year the Exploit Development […]


Announcing NCC Group’s Cryptopals Guided Tour: Set 2

Hello and welcome to NCC Group’s Cryptopals guided tour! This post is the second in a series of eight installments (previously) covering the solutions to the Cryptopals Crypto Challenges. For those who don’t know, Cryptopals is a series of eight sets of challenges covering common cryptographic constructs and common attacks on them. You can read […]


Public Report – Confidential Space Security Review

During the summer of 2022, Google engaged NCC Group to conduct a security assessment of the Confidential Space product. The system provides a confidential computing environment that allows cloud customers to run workloads in the cloud that can be attested to run a specific payload with high assurances that the workload was not and cannot […]


Toner Deaf – Printing your next persistence (Hexacon 2022)

On Friday 14th of October 2022 Alex Plaskett (@alexjplaskett) and Cedric Halbronn (@saidelike) presented Toner Deaf – Printing your next persistence at Hexacon 2022. This talk demonstrated remote over the network exploitation of a Lexmark printer and persistence across both firmware updates and reboots. The video from this talk is now available here: The slides […]


SharkBot: a “new” generation Android banking Trojan being distributed on Google Play Store

Authors: Alberto Segura, Malware analyst Rolf Govers, Malware analyst Forensic IT Expert NCC Group, as well as many other researchers noticed a rise in Android malware last year, especially Android banking malware. Within the Threat Intelligence team of NCC Group we’re looking closely to several of these malware families to provide valuable information to our […]