DEF CON 26: Recon Village - Mastering Passive Network Attacks

When attacking modern internal networks, intelligence is everything. Understanding the environment you are operating in can be the difference between successfully penetrating your target environment or missing targets of opportunity due to lack of understand about the target environment.

While true, obtaining information about the environment in a stealthy manner, when required, can be difficult within a mature environment. Even during overt engagements, obtaining the information you need within a limited time window can be difficult, especially during engagement delays.

Further complicating things, often testing scope is based off of poor assumptions about the target environment, often leading unrealistic scope reductions a real-world attacker would not operate out of.

Over the years internal testing engagements have been operating on various assumptions within switched networks, often driving engagement execution methods, but what if these assumptions were wrong? What if we could utilize the wasted time, even weeks in advance, between deployment and engagement execution, to take the time to understand the network? What if we could leverage the realities of modern networks and the things customers do to ‚Äòprepare’ for an engagement (backups, security scans, etc.) through 100% passive methods, challenging your assumptions about the network?

Prebellico is pre-engagement and post compromise intelligence gathering mechanism designed to gather as much information about the target environment through 100% passive methods. Utilizing very few resources, Prebellico permits an attacker the ability to understand the target environment by providing information such as the intent of internal systems, internal network address space, hostnames, egress filtering, TCP trust relationships, as well as map open TCP/UDP ports through reverse port scanning using 100% passive techniques.”