Our discussion subject for the month of March was Network Pen Tests.

• What are they?
• Do they provide value?
• How are they done?
• What do you do with the results?

Our guest speaker was Russel C. Van Tuyl (@Ne0nd0g). Russel is an experienced Network Pen Tester with Sword & Shield in Knoxville, TN and has agreed to walk us through his Network Pen Testing procedures.

Here is a quick write up about his presentation:

Attackers can take complete control of a Windows domain by establishing full administrative rights to networks resources. This access can then be used to steal your organizations crown jewels, the thing that makes your organization money. This talk will introduce common attack paths used to compromise a domain. Additionally, a brief introduction to the tools used to perform some of these common attacks will be covered. This presentation will conclude by providing information on mitigating or detecting these common attacks. The audience will be provided with an opportunity to ask any questions, even if they’re not related to the presentation.

Update: Russel did a fantastic job presenting. His presentation was entertaining and had a ton of great information. He not only covered some of the techniques he uses when pen testing, he also talked about ways to mitigate them. If you didn’t walk away with a “To Do” list of things to check on your network, or a list of fun new things to try, you weren’t paying attention.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

Common Pen Testing Techniques

 

He demonstrated how PowerShell can be an admins best friend, or worst enemy, by showing us how easy it was to use PowerShell Empire to compromise a box.

 

Our own Grant Sims has since created step by step video showing how to use one of the PowerShell techniques Russel spoke about. He shows how to use PowerSploit to get a meterpreter shell: