The Windows System Monitor (Sysmon) is one of the chattiest tools. With all the information coming in, it can be difficult and expensive to use it efficiently. However, the Graylog Illuminate package gives you a way to fine-tune it so that you can get better data and manage your ingestion rate better. Sysmon gives you awareness of what’s going on in your endpoints.

In an earlier blog post, we spoke about building your own ProblemChild framework from scratch in the Elastic Stack to detect living off the land (LOtL) activity. As promised, we have now also released a fully trained detection model, anomaly detection configurations, and detection rules that you can use to get ProblemChild up and running in your environment in a matter of minutes.

This quick blog is the first in a two-part series discussing a userland Windows exploit initially disclosed by James Forshaw and Alex Ionescu. The exploit enables attackers to perform highly privileged actions that typically require a kernel driver.

In our previous blog post on Windows access tokens for security practitioners, we covered: Having covered some of the key concepts in Windows security, we will now build on this knowledge and start to look at how attackers can abuse legitimate Windows functionality to move laterally and compromise Active Directory domains. This blog has deliberately attempted to abstract away the workings of specific Windows network authentication protocols (e.g., NTLM and Kerberos) where possible.

In this blog in the “IT security under attack” series, we wanted to shed some light on an unfamiliar and seldom discussed topic in IT security: the default, out-of-the-box configurations in IT environments that may be putting your network and users at risk. Default settings, and why the initial configuration is not the most secure

Most of the time, threat actors in the cybersecurity landscape don’t employ advanced techniques and tools to intrude and establish a foothold within networks. Often, they disguise malicious operations by mimicking the activities of legitimate users, leaving behind little to no footprint. Blending malicious actions with day-to-day IT activities helps attackers maintain a low profile and remain undetected for a longer period.

In this blog we will explore several ways that Alternate Data Streams (ADS) are abused by attackers to hide files and evade detection, defences based on them (and ways to bypass those defences!) but also how they can be used to help malware evade dynamic analysis.