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You're reading from  Cybersecurity Attacks ‚Äì Red Team Strategies

Product typeBook
Published inMar 2020
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838828868
Edition1st Edition
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Johann Rehberger
Johann Rehberger
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Johann Rehberger

Johann Rehberger has over fifteen years of experience in threat analysis, threat modeling, risk management, penetration testing, and red teaming. As part of his many years at Microsoft, Johann established a penetration test team in Azure Data and led the program as Principal Security Engineering Manager. Recently, he built out a red team at Uber and currently works as an independent security and software engineer. Johann is well versed in analysis, design, implementation, and testing of software systems. Additionally, he enjoys providing training and was an instructor for ethical hacking at the University of Washington. Johann contributed to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and holds a master's in computer security from the University of Liverpool.
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Exploiting the default credentials of local admin accounts

Organizations often face challenges regarding how to manage a large fleet of machines at scale. This becomes especially tricky in heterogeneous environments. Besides Active Directory and group policies, systems such as Chef are used to configure and manage the fleet.

Important Note

One thing to look for is the existence of additional users on regular corporate laptops, especially administrative accounts.

This is something I have seen a couple of times. Basically, there's a common root user (or Administrator account) that IT provisions and uses to troubleshoot or manage the device. If it's the same password across the organization, it's of importance for the red teamers to get that password as it provides the Domain Administrator equivalent.

An adversary might try to brute-force it, and subsequently have the password to log in to any workstation! Alternatively, the password may be stored in a local...

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Cybersecurity Attacks – Red Team Strategies
Published in: Mar 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838828868

Author (1)

author image
Johann Rehberger

Johann Rehberger has over fifteen years of experience in threat analysis, threat modeling, risk management, penetration testing, and red teaming. As part of his many years at Microsoft, Johann established a penetration test team in Azure Data and led the program as Principal Security Engineering Manager. Recently, he built out a red team at Uber and currently works as an independent security and software engineer. Johann is well versed in analysis, design, implementation, and testing of software systems. Additionally, he enjoys providing training and was an instructor for ethical hacking at the University of Washington. Johann contributed to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and holds a master's in computer security from the University of Liverpool.
Read more about Johann Rehberger