Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), cybersecurity software company Fortra™ and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) are taking technical and legal action to disrupt cracked, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike and abused Microsoft software, which have been used by cybercriminals to distribute malware, including ransomware. This is a change in the way DCU has...

Fake sites for popular software have occasionally been used by cyber criminal groups to push malware. Campaigns pushing IcedID malware (also known as Bokbot) also use this method as a distribution technique (we also commonly see IcedID sent through email).

During an internal assessment, I performed an NTLM relay and ended up owning the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account of the Windows server. Looking at the users connected on the same server, I knew that a domain administrator account was connected. All I had to do to compromise the domain, was compromise the account. This could be achieved by dumping the memory of the LSASS process and collecting their credentials or Kerberos TGT’s. Seemed easy until I realised an EDR was installed on the system. Long story short, I ended up compromising the domain admin account without touching the LSASS process. To do so, I relied on an internal Windows mechanism called token manipulation. The goal of this blog post is to present how I did it. We will see what access tokens are, what they are used for, how we can manipulate them to usurp legitimate accounts without touching LSASS and finally I will present a tool and a CrackMapExec module that can be used during such assessments. All the source code, binaries and CrackMapExec module can be found here https://github.com/sensepost/impersonate.