Recently I had the pleasure and honour to be asked for adding my review for the Hands-on Red Team Tactics– A Red Team Edition book. As this book is published in September 2018 thence it covers all latest track of evasions and attacks.

I appreciate the great effort has been done by “Himanshu Sharma” who is an Indian Ethical Hacker and has already achieved fame for finding security loopholes and vulnerabilities in Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Uber, AT&T, Avira, and many more with hall of fame listings. And, “Harpreet Singh” who has more than 5 years experience in the field of Ethical Hacking, Penetration Testing, and Red Teaming. Harpreet is an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) and Offensive Security Wireless Professional (OSWP).

Adding Especial Thanks to “Raj Chandel” and “Aarti Singh” for assisting me to comprehend the concept of red team operation in a most effective way.

While reading this book I found it has covered some very advanced and useful tools for performing red team practice that I generally use while performing red team operation, therefore, I feel this book is virtuous resource for those who wish to enhance their skills from traditional VAPT.

Book Overview

Red Teaming is used to enhance security by performing simulated attacks on the organization in order to detect network and system vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics starts with an overview of pentesting and Red Teaming, before giving an introduction of few of the latest pentesting tools. You will then move on to exploring Metasploit and getting to grips with Armitage. Once you have studied the basics, you will understand Cobalt Strike basic, usage and how to set up a team server of Cobalt Strike.

You will discover some common lesser-known techniques for pivoting and how to pivot over SSH, before using Cobalt Strike to pivot. This comprehensive guide demonstrates the advanced methods of post-exploitation using Cobalt Strike and introduces you to Command-and-control servers (C2) and Redirectors. All this will help you achieve persistence using Beacons and Data Exfiltration, and will also give you the chance to run through the methodology to use Red Team activity tools like Empire during a Red Team activity on Active Directory and Domain Controller.

By the end of the book, you will have learned advanced penetration testing tools, techniques to get reverse shells over encrypted channels and processes for post-exploitation. In addition to this, you will explore frameworks such as Empire which include maintaining persistent access, staying untraceable, and getting reverse connections over different C2 covert channels.

 Key Features

• Target a complex enterprise environment in a red team activity
• Detect threats and respond to them with a real-world cyber-attack simulation
• Explore advanced penetration testing tools and techniques

Who this book is for?

Hands-On Red Team Tactics is for you if you are an IT professional, pentester, security consultant, or ethical hacker interested in the IT security domain and wants to go beyond Penetration Testing. Preliminary knowledge of penetration testing will be beneficial.

What you will learn

• Get started with red team engagements using less common methods
• Explore a variety of post-exploitation techniques
• Get acquainted with all the tools and frameworks included in the Metasploit framework
• Discover how you can gain stealth access to systems via red teaming
• Understand the concept of redirectors to add further anonymity to your C2
• Work through a range of uncommon data exfiltration techniques

What this book covers?

Chapter 1: Red-Teaming and Pentesting, helps you understand about different standards of pentesting followed across the industry, and we went through the seven phases of the PTES standard in detail.

Chapter 2: Pentesting 2018, introduces you to MSF Payload Creator (MSFPC). We will also look at the use of resource files which were generated by MSFPC besides the payload file.

Chapter 3: Foreplay – Metasploit Basics, illuminates about team server and the Armitage client, including the setup and usage of Armitage.

Chapter 4: Getting Started with Cobalt Strike, starts by exploring the red-team exercise as well as the concept of the cyber kill chain, which can be used for an attack plan. The chapter then introduces you to Cobalt Strike, the tool that is used for red-team operations.

Chapter 5: ./ReverseShell, explores what a reverse connection and reverse shell connection is using various tools. Furthermore, we will endeavour different payloads to get reverse shell connections using Metasploit.

Chapter 6: Pivoting, dives into port forwarding and its uses. We will also learn about pivoting and its uses, followed by methods of port forwarding via SSH.

Chapter 7: Age of Empire – The beginning, introduces you to Empire and its fundamentals.

We will also cover the Empire’s basic usage and the post-exploitation basics for Windows, Linux and OSX.

Chapter 8: Age of Empire – Owning Domain Controllers, delves into some more advanced uses of the Empire tool to get access to the Domain Controller.

Chapter 9: Cobalt Strike – Red Team Operations, enlightens about the listener module of Cobalt Strike along with its type and usage.

Chapter 10: C2 – Master of Puppets, provides an introduction to command and control (C2) servers and discussed how they are used in a red team operation.

Chapter 11: Obfuscate C2s – Introducing Redirectors, introduces you to redirectors and the reason why obfuscating C2s are required. We have also covered how we can obfuscate C2s in a secure manner so that we can protect our C2s from getting detected by the Blue team.

Chapter 12: Achieving Persistence, dives into achieving persistence using Armitage’s inbuilt exploit modules, then we will learn how to do the same via Empire on Windows, Linux, and macOS machines.

Chapter 13: Data Exfiltration, exhibits some basic ways of transferring data using simple tools like Netcat, OpenSSL and PowerShell. Next, we jumped into transforming the data using text-based steganography to avoid detection, as well as looking at the usage of the CloakifyFactory tool.

This book is available on Amazon you can buy this from the link given below :

https://www.amazon.in/s?k=B077LW1T22&i=stripbooks&_encoding=UTF8&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Author: Geet Madan is a Certified Ethical Hacker, Researcher and Technical Writer at Hacking Articles on Information Security. Contact here