Compass Security Blog

Offensive Defense

Three-Headed Potato Dog

Earlier this year, several security researchers published research about using DCOM to coerce Windows systems to authenticate to other systems. This can be misused to relay the authentication to NTLM or Kerberos, to AD CS over HTTP for instance. This sounds like a hot and complex topic. Let’s take a look back how this started […]

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How to become a Hacker

Introduction Last year, I attended a job fair organized by the Association of Computer Science Students at ETH Zürich. It was a rewarding experience to be able to share my day-to-day work in a field I am so passionate about. We got to talk to numerous students at different stages of their studies, as well […]

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Relaying NTLM to MSSQL

Readers of this blog probably know that I like to try NTLM relaying over all protocols possible! Relaying to Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) is known to work when using the default weak configuration.

With this blog post, we show some dangerous configurations and release a small tool to automate NTLM relaying in these cases.

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From MQTT Fundamentals to CVE

Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) is an area that has grown strongly in recent years and is increasingly being used in the business world. To be able to test the security in this area, let’s take a closer look at the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the protocol.

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Lenovo Update Your Privileges

A journey into the discovery of privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the Lenovo Update process.

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Securing Connections to your Remote Desktop

When accessing a remote server, one should always assume it has been compromised or might be in the near future. It is particularly crucial for users with administrative privileges to establish a secure connection to the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) service in order to not fall victim to credential theft or impersonation. To achieve this, there exist several measures in Windows. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of them, their benefits and their drawbacks.

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Compiling a Mimikatz Module for Dumping Citrix Credz

Sometimes, the good old credential dumping techniques just won’t work. This is the story of how a bad actor could dump credentials on a fully-patched, monitored and hardened workstation.

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Why You Should Implement a Banned Password List

The ntds.dit file from a domain controller contains all password hashes of the domain. In a company with employees around the globe we were allowed to analyze the hashes. Here are the results, and the reason why you should implement a banned password list.

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No Passwords More Problems

Passwordless products promise greater security and convenience by allowing users to log in to Windows systems with only their smartphone. But what is going on behind the scenes and how could a domain’s security stance be worsened by such a solution? In this post I will explain how these products are implemented and detail the vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered in three tested products.

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BloodHound Inner Workings & Limitations – Part 3: Session Enumeration Through Remote Registry & Summary

BloodHound is the way to go to for finding attack paths in an Active Directory (AD) environment. However, it is not always clear how the data is gathered without looking at the code of SharpHound, the data ingestor for BloodHound. Microsoft hardened their systems over time through updates, which makes enumeration of Active Directory (AD) […]

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