Analyzing & Detecting IIS Backdoors

IIS Extensions As Backdoors Microsoft recently published an interesting blog explaining how they’ve noticed a new trend where attackers have been leveraging Internet Information Services (IIS) extensions to covertly backdoor Windows servers: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2022/07/26/malicious-iis-extensions-quietly-open-persistent-backdoors-into-servers/ The Microsoft post contains a wealth of Continue reading

Disabling PowerShell v2 with Group Policy

In this post I am going to tackle something that I have been wanting to play around with for awhile, disabling PowerShell v2 at an enterprise scale. As a former systems engineer and now a security engineer, I have a Continue reading

Gathering Windows, PowerShell and Sysmon Events with Winlogbeat – ELK 7 – Windows Server 2016 (Part II)

In part I of this series, Installing ELK 7 (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) on Windows Server 2016, I covered the following: Installing and configuring Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana as Windows services Installing and configuring Winlogbeat to forward logs from the Continue reading

Installing ELK 7 (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) – Windows Server 2016 (Part I)

I am a huge fan of the Elastic stack as it can provide a great deal of visibility into even the largest of environments, which can help enable both engineering and security teams rapidly triage technical issues or incidents at Continue reading

Apache Struts CVE-2018-11776 – Testing, Analyzing, & Detection

Intro Any time a new Apache Struts vulnerability comes out it should be taken pretty seriously as there are many “mission critical” systems that are leveraging the framework, with a considerable amount of them being public facing. Unfortunately, as a Continue reading