Abusing Exported Functions and Exposed DCOM Interfaces for Pass-Thru Command Execution and Lateral Movement
Last Wednesday, I had some down time so I decided to hunt around in System32 to see if I could find anything of potential interest. I located a few DLL files that shared an interesting export function called OpenURL: While looking for a quick win, I wanted to see if anything could be invoked without much effort. Sure enough, url.dll allowed for the execution an HTML application (.hta) using these commands: rundll32.exe url.dll,OpenURL "local\path\to\harmless.hta" rundll32.exe url.dll,OpenURLA "local\path\to\harmless.hta" After a few more functional tests across platforms, I (prematurely) posted this on Twitter, and the initial feedback was incredibly fast, educational, and humbling. On one hand, I should have went through a few more test routines to understand what was actually happening under the hood prior to posting. Conversely, it was incredible to see the instant reaction from some of the best practitioners in the field who helped triage this in what seemed like a matter of minutes. Big thanks to @subTee, @r0wdy_, and @Hexacorn for their rapid analysis! In short, the HTA was invoked using the OpenURL function, allowing for pass-thru command execution and lateral movement.
FEATURES
ALTERNATIVES
A DNS rebinding attack framework for security researchers and penetration testers.
A script to enumerate Google Storage buckets and determine access and privilege escalation
A document that helps inform red team planning by contrasting against the very specific red team style described in Red Teams.
Adversary emulation framework for testing security measures in network environments.
FOCA is a tool used to find metadata and hidden information in scanned documents, with capabilities to analyze various file types and extract EXIF information.
Online Telegram bot for collecting information on individuals from various websites.
An open-source intelligence collection, research, and artifact management tool inspired by SpiderFoot, Harpoon, and DataSploit.
PINNED
InfoSecHired
An AI-powered career platform that automates the creation of cybersecurity job application materials and provides company-specific insights for job seekers.
Mandos Brief Newsletter
A weekly newsletter providing cybersecurity leadership insights, industry updates, and strategic guidance for security professionals advancing to management positions.
CTIChef.com Detection Feeds
A tiered cyber threat intelligence service providing detection rules from public repositories with varying levels of analysis, processing, and guidance for security teams.
OSINTLeak
OSINTLeak is a tool for discovering and analyzing leaked sensitive information across various online sources to identify potential security risks.
ImmuniWeb® Discovery
ImmuniWeb Discovery is an attack surface management platform that continuously monitors an organization's external digital assets for security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats across domains, applications, cloud resources, and the dark web.
Checkmarx SCA
A software composition analysis tool that identifies vulnerabilities, malicious code, and license risks in open source dependencies throughout the software development lifecycle.
Orca Security
A cloud-native application protection platform that provides agentless security monitoring, vulnerability management, and compliance capabilities across multi-cloud environments.
DryRun
A GitHub application that performs automated security code reviews by analyzing contextual security aspects of code changes during pull requests.