Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: Adversary Simulation


From: Paul Melson <pmelson () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2016 14:57:37 -0600

So are you aware of a criminal actor that uses Immunity's Innuendo in their attacks?  If not, then which adversary are 
you simulating?

The point to my obvious straw man is that if you really want to help your clients up their game in detecting and 
responding to real threats, shouldn't you study the actors that target their industry verticals and emulate their 
operations using the same tools and tactics they are known to choose?  



On Nov 29, 2016, at 9:26 AM, dave aitel <dave () immunityinc com> wrote:

So obviously everything a penetration testing company does is at some level "Adversary Simulation". I like to call it 
"Focused Training" - because penetration testing is more about education than anything else, but the WAY you do to 
that is by emulating and instrumenting some sort of adversarial process.

Ok, that said, we have for the past year offered a special service called Adversary Simulation by which we meant 
something quite specific. We go to some big financial company, usually super under-dressed for the cold because we 
live in Miami, and we install INNUENDO on a couple machines. Then we exfiltrate a few terabytes of data over whatever 
protocols are working and we work with the company to do a hardcore analysis of their detection systems for that sort 
of thing.

That sounds simple. But in practice, every company at that size range has multiple products trying to detect you, and 
they provide overlapping coverage. Sometimes the Alerts are useful, and sometimes not. For example, when you're doing 
DNS exfiltration, FireEye will alert on the weirdness of the DNS packets. But it has no idea who the infected 
endpoint is, because those DNS packets came from intermediary DNS servers! :)

With web-based analysis systems I worry more about false positives, and of course, false negatives. Detecting beacons 
from malware but not from, say, DropBox is a hard problem. In theory, products like StealthWatch work, but in 
practice, that depends on the team.
Likewise, there are gaps in the market itself: Who is looking at all outbound e-mail to find data exfiltration 
channels? And on the host, when faced with a new product, all the protection systems we've seen have not detected 
INNUENDO. Some of them detect injection, but you don't really need to do that. What if there is too much chaos on a 
big company's desktop for reputation-based protection systems to work? 
-dave





_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunityinc com
https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunityinc com
https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave

Current thread: