Centurion: Bring Your Own Execution Environment
Writing my own virtualized loader is something I’ve been wanting to do since I first read Microsoft’s deep dive on FinFisher’s multi-layered VM obfuscation back in 2018. FinFisher didn’t just use one layer of protection, it implemented a custom virtual machine with 32 opcode handlers, wrapped that in spaghetti code and anti-debug checks, and then buried a second VM […]
Adversarial Oracles: LLM-Guided EDR Signature Reduction
In previous blog posts we’ve talked about getting nerd sniped. Today we’re going to talk about a kind of nerd sniping that any offensive security tool creator is familiar with; when your tool gets signatured. This normally kicks off a frustrating spiral of back and forth changes between the tool author and security vendors until […]
Your Login Page Is Lying: What AI Agents Find When They Read Your Frontend
TL;DR: Single-page applications ship their entire frontend codebase to every visitor, including unauthenticated ones. Even a login page with no visible functionality delivers JavaScript bundles containing route definitions, API endpoint URLs, authentication logic, data models, and sometimes hardcoded secrets. As part of Guard’s continuous penetration testing, we use AI-assisted tooling to extract this information and […]
Which Came First: The System Prompt, or the RCE?
During a recent penetration test, we came across an AI-powered desktop application that acted as a bridge between Claude (Opus 4.5) and a third-party asset management platform. The idea is simple: instead of clicking through dashboards and making API calls, users just ask the agent to do it for them. “How many open tickets do […]
Mapping the Unknown: Introducing Pius for Organizational Asset Discovery
Asset discovery is an essential part of Praetorian’s service delivery process. When we are engaged to carry out continuous external penetration testing, one key action is to build and maintain a thorough target asset inventory that goes beyond any lists or databases provided by the system owner. Pius is our open-source attack surface mapping tool […]
Ghost Calls: Abusing Web Conferencing for Covert Command & Control (Part 2 of 2)
In part one, we discussed the architecture of web conferencing applications, with a specific focus on Zoom’s architecture to support web conferencing at a massive global scale. Part two will discuss the approach we developed to support tunneling traffic through Zoom and Microsoft Teams using the TURN protocol. Let’s start with a quick recap of […]
Ghost Calls: Abusing Web Conferencing for Covert Command & Control (Part 1 of 2)
Web conferencing covert C2 turns the most trusted traffic on an enterprise network, the daily Zoom and Teams calls defenders are told to exempt from inspection, into an interactive command-and-control channel. In the middle of a particularly tight red team engagement, we hit a familiar wall. Our long-term implant was rock solid: quiet, persistent, and […]
Content Discovery: Understanding Your Web Attack Surface
Attack Surface Management (ASM) tools find quite a lot of vulnerabilities on the Web. This really isn’t surprising, given that HTTP/S is by far the most common and broadest of all the services comprising the Internet. In fact, Web-based issues represent the majority of the findings about which our Managed Service Providers (MSPs) inform our […]
Screenshotting: Can You See What I See?
At Praetorian, we firmly believe that the most effective way to secure your systems is to look at them through an offensive lens. After all, when you view yourself the same way an attacker does, you get a better understanding of which defenses are likely to be effective. When building Chariot, our External Attack Surface […]
Phantom of the Pipeline: Abusing Self-Hosted CI/CD Runners
Introduction Throughout numerous Red Teams in 2022, a common theme of Source Control Supply Chain attacks in GitHub repositories has emerged. After many hours manually hunting for and exploiting these attack paths, we’ve built an all-in-one toolkit called Gato (Github Attack Toolkit) for finding and attacking repositories where these misconfigurations are present. We released the […]