defence in depth.

Whether compromising a system for legitimate or non-legitimate purposes, bypassing anti-virus software is often an integral step in any intrusion exercise. Fortunately for enterprise, anti-virus and anti-malware software is now commonplace in most organisiations. Whilst many of the tools that attackers wish to implement are constantly being blacklisted, this isn't without reservation. Attackers are still getting malware into systems and penetration testers are still able to compromise systems. So the question is, how is this possible? The answer: Bypassing anti-virus, of course. In this post I intent to present several tools that can be used in bypassing anti-virus/anti-malware software. I will provide a brief background on each tools operation and a summary of its use. But first, some background. Anti-virus software typically works by using either signature-based detection or heuristic-based detection (some products use both). Signature-based detection products rely on rec...

Nowadays, exploiting a system requires little, if no knowledge of computer systems or networking. Merely, someone with 10 minutes on their hands that is interested enough to Google how it’s done. One with very little skills has the ability to fire up Metasploit, load an exploit, and fire it at the target system – giving attacker’s the ability to compromise a system within minutes. I thought I would write a post on Metasploit’s autopwn module to reiterate just how simple it is to attack/compromise a system in today’s environment. My intentions here are to give you a tutorial on the Metasploit autopwn module and provide a timely reminder on just how important it is to have a good patch policy in place. I would also recommend regular audits on system services. The tools I will be using in this tutorial are: Nessus - A free vulnerability scanner for Mac OS, Windows and Linux Metasploit – framework 3 - A free exploit framework for launching exploits against targets A virtual machine runni...