Empire – PowerShell Post-Exploitation Agent

Empire is a pure PowerShell post-exploitation agent built on cryptographically secure communications and a flexible architecture. Empire implements the ability to run PowerShell agents without needing powershell.exe, rapidly deployable post-exploitation modules ranging from key loggers to Mimikatz, and adaptable communications to evade network detection, all wrapped up in a usability-focused framework.

It has a LOT of modules (90+) and is currently in the midst of implementing a RESTful API which will be great.

Module Categories

Currently Empire has the following categories for modules:

• Code Execution – Ways to run more code
• Collection – Post exploitation data collection
• Credentials – Collect and use creds
• Exfiltration – Identify egress channels
• Lateral Movement – Move around the network
• Management – Host management and auxilary
• Persistence – Survive reboots
• Privesc – Privilege escalation capabilities
• Recon – Test further entry points (HTTP Basic Auth etc)
• Situational Awareness – Network awareness
• Trollsploit – For the lulz

Why PowerShell?

PowerShell offers a multitude of offensive advantages, including:

• Full .NET access
• Application whitelisting
• Direct access to the Win32 API
• Ability to assemble malicious binaries in memor
• Default installation on Windows 7+.

Offensive PowerShell had a watershed year in 2014, but despite the multitude of useful projects, many pen-testers still struggle to integrate PowerShell into their engagements in a secure manner.

How it works

Empire has a few components which you can chain together, similar to something like Metasploits.

It has:

Listeners – Think of this like a metasploit handler, this will catch your session.
Stagers – This is your payload, this is what you will execute on your target system.
Agents – This is how you interact with the target system, you can gather stats & info or run shell commands.

It also had fairly robust logging built in.

You can download Empire here:

Empire-1.5.zip

MISP – Malware Information Sharing Platform

MISP, Malware Information Sharing Platform and Threat Sharing, is an open source software solution for collecting, storing, distributing and sharing cyber security indicators and threat about cyber security incidents analysis and malware analysis. MISP is designed by and for incident analysts, security and ICT professionals or malware reverser to support their day-to-day operations to share structured informations efficiently.

The objective of MISP is to foster the sharing of structured information within the security community and abroad. MISP provides functionalities to support the exchange of information but also the consumption of the information by Network Detection Intrusion System (NIDS), LIDS but also log analysis tools, SIEMs.

Core Functionalities

• An efficient IOC and indicators database allowing to store technical and non-technical information about malware samples, incidents, attackers and intelligence.
• Automatic correlation finding relationships between attributes and indicators from malware, attacks campaigns or analysis.
• Built-in sharing functionality to ease data sharing using different model of distributions. MISP can synchronize automatically events and attributes among different MISP. Advanced filtering functionalities can be used to meet each organization sharing policy including a flexible sharing group capacity and an attribute level distribution mechanisms.
• An intuitive user-interface for end-users to create, update and collaborate on events and attributes/indicators. A graphical interface to navigate seamlessly between events and their correlations. Advanced filtering functionalities and warning list to help the analysts to contribute events and attributes.
• storing data in a structured format (allowing automated use of the database for various purposes) with an extensive support of cyber security indicators along fraud indicators as in the financial sector.
• export: generating IDS, OpenIOC, plain text, CSV, MISP XML or JSON output to integrate with other systems (network IDS, host IDS, custom tools)
• import: bulk-import, batch-import, import from OpenIOC, GFI sandbox, ThreatConnect CSV.
• Flexible free text import tool to ease the integration of unstructured reports into MISP.
• A gentle system to collaborate on events and attributes allowing MISP users to propose changes or updates to attributes/indicators.
• data-sharing: automatically exchange and synchronization with other parties and trust-groups using MISP.
• delegating of sharing: allows a simple pseudo-anonymous mechanism to delegate publication of event/indicators to another organization.
• Flexible API to integrate MISP with your own solutions. MISP is bundled with PyMISP which is a flexible Python Library to fetch, add or update events attributes, handle malware samples or search for attributes.
• Adjustable taxonomy to classify and tag events following your own classification schemes or existing classification. The taxonomy can be local to your MISP but also shareable among MISP instances.
• Expansion modules in Python to expand MISP with your own services or activate already available misp-modules.
• Sighting support to get observations from organizations concerning shared indicators and attributes. Sighting can be contributed via MISP user-interface, API as MISP document or STIX sighting documents.
• STIX support: export data in the STIX format (XML and JSON).
• Integrated encryption and signing of the notifications via PGP and/or S/MIME depending of the user preferences.

Exchanging info results in faster detection of targeted attacks and improves the detection ratio while reducing the false positives. We also avoid reversing similar malware as we know very fast that others team or organizations who already analyzed a specific malware.

You can download MISP here:

MISP-v2.4.41.zip