Getting Started with Praetorian’s ATT&CK Automation

Earlier this month, Praetorian released its automation for emulating adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework. We’ve gotten a number of requests from users asking for more detailed instructions on how to get started with the tool. This blog post accompanies the recently released video tutorial.

Process Injection and Process Hollowing (ATT&CK T1055 & T1093)

We are releasing Vulcan, a tool to make it easy and fast to test various forms of injection. All of the techniques included are already public. Vulcan brings them together in a single tool to test endpoint detection and response (EDR) coverage so that you can quickly identify detection gaps. This tool can be used as a test-harness to identify gaps so that efforts can be focused on detecting holes.

ICMP C2 Standard Non-Application Layer Protocol (ATT&CK T1095)

While ICMP may not be the answer for exfiltration, it can be very useful as a long-term C2 alternative channel. If all other communications channels didn’t work or failed or if persistence / access was terminated, we could always maintain a stealthy ICMP backup channel, which we could use to respawn primary C2 channel.

Using Slack Web Services as a C2 Channel (ATT&CK T1102)

Our proof of concept (PoC) blends in with normal business activities such as user-to-user or user-to-group communications. Detecting this type of activity requires sophisticated network analysis capabilities, such as the ability to intercept and decrypt SSL messages. Future versions may add additional encryption on top of SSL. In our PoC, we also configure a random sleep between 1m and 5m to further obfuscate our activity. These sleep times can help our C2 fly under the radar, but will also impact the ability of the attack operator to execute rapidly depending on how aggressively the timeouts are configured.

Why Praetorian Benchmarks to MITRE ATT&CK™ and Why You Should Too

When it came to improving our Purple Team service line, which maps to “Detect” and “Respond” in the NIST CSF, we wanted to provide a similar high quality of data and metrics to our clients. In our experience, it is hard to drive change in any organization unless those changes can be tied to measurable results. After conducting a survey of known frameworks, we settled on the ATT&CK™ framework from MITRE.

Signed Binaries Proxy Execution – T1218

The MITRE ATTACK April release included is a new TTP known as ‘Signed Binaries Proxy Execution’ which is T1218. This TTP is based on an attacker using signed binaries to perform malicious activities.

Signed Scripts Proxy Execution – T1216

Many organizations trust all signed code from Microsoft. Unfortunately, there are many ways in which attackers can use this trust against them. Previously, we covered using signed binaries to perform malicious activities. In this post, we will be covering how to use signed scripts.

How to use Kerberoasting – T1208 for Privilege Escalation

In our experience, Kerberoasting is an attack that is similar to others in that defenders need to fully under it to be able to properly migrate the risks. It’s our goal that through pushing this content into the MITRE ATT&CK framework we have increased the awareness of this TTP so that organizations can be better protected in the future.

Summary of April MITRE ATT&CK RELEASE

MITRE’s Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) is a curated knowledge base and model for cyber adversary behavior, reflecting the various phases of an adversary’s lifecycle and the platforms they are known to target. ATT&CK is useful for understanding security risk against known adversary behavior, for planning security improvements, and verifying defenses work as expected.