Headshot of Alexander Polce Leary

Alexander Polce Leary

Principal Security Consultant

Alexander Leary holds a BS in Information Security and Forensics from the Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated Summa Cum Laude. Alexander has been involved in information security consulting for over 5 years. Prior to becoming involved in computer security, Alexander worked as a system administrator, network administrator, and web developer.

Alexander specializes in network penetration testing and email phishing. Alexander is also involved in the research and development of various tools and frameworks including PowerShell Empire.

More by Alexander Polce Leary

Network Pentesting

Tokenvator Release 3

This blog post discusses new additions to the Tokenvator for adding Token Privileges and manually crafting access tokens.

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Adversary Simulation

Tokenvator: Release 2

New Tokenvator release! Now with more token privilege manipulation, new named pipe token attacks, and File System Minifilter manipulation.

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Thick Application Pentesting

.Net Reflection without System.Reflection.Assembly

This blog shows how to load a .Net Assembly without having to call the suspicious Assembly.LoadFile() or Assembly.Load() Functions. Examples of the new version of RunDotNetDll32 will also be shared that use the technique.

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Adversary Simulation

Tokenvator: A Tool to Elevate Privilege using Windows Tokens

Tokenvator: A Tool to Elevate Privilege using Windows Tokens – It works by impersonating or altering authentication tokens in processes that the executing process has the appropriate level of permissions to.

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Adversary Simulation

Executing .NET Methods with RunDotNetDll32

This blog introduces RunDotNetDll32.exe, which is a new tool for reflectively enumerating and executing .NET methods. It’s syntactically very similar to RunDll32.exe.

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Network Pentesting

Targeting RSA Emergency Access Tokencodes for Fun and Profit

A few months ago, one of my RSA soft token was on the fritz. It refused to work, and I was not able to remote into the client’s network to do an internal project for them. In fiddling with the RSA self-service console, and playing around with the troubleshooting section, I came across this feature called the Emergency Access Tokencode.

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Network Pentesting

Expanding the Empire with SQL

The core of PowerUpSQL is now in Empire. Let's quickly go over how these modules work in Empire as a few changes had to be made for it to be integrated.

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Adversary Simulation

Getting Started with WMI Weaponization – Part 6

Lets look at another practical example of weaponizing WMI using PowerShell. Earlier we went over how to create a custom WMI class. Using this class along with the Set-WmiInstance command we can create a class that we can then use to store files as Base64 Encoded strings.

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Adversary Simulation

Getting Started with WMI Weaponization – Part 5

Like SQL, WMI can be setup with a set of Triggers. We can use these triggers to maintain persistence on a system by launching commands after a specified event is detected. These are stored in the root/subscription namespace and fall into two broad categories, Intrinsic Events and Extrinsic Events.

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Adversary Simulation

Getting Started with WMI Weaponization – Part 4

In this post I’ll cover another method for recovering the ntds.dit file remotely using WMI Volume Shadow Copy methods, but the methods described here could also be used to retrieve local password hashes from the SAM and SYSTEM file.

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Adversary Simulation

Getting Started with WMI Weaponization – Part 3

Substantive changes to the configuration of a system can be made with WMI. These are often overlooked, as there are other and less obscure methods to accomplish the same goal. That said the ability to run these commands remotely through a different medium make these classes quite capable.

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Adversary Simulation

Getting Started with WMI Weaponization – Part 1

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a Microsoft management protocol derived from the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) protocol. WMI is a web service that can perform management operations on the host operating system. It has also been a part of Windows since Windows 95 where it was available as an optional feature.

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