Recent content on Cas van Cooten
Hi! I’m Cas, an offensive security enthusiast and Red Teamer based in the Netherlands. I like to play around with anything that is related to hacking, security, programming languages, or tech in general. I love to learn, but I love sharing the things that I have learned even more - that’s what this blog is for. If you would like to get in touch you can do so via Twitter or email .…
Wow, been a while since my last blog 😅. During some research I came across a technique variation which I felt was interesting enough to share in a brief blog post. It relates to how the bootstrapping functionality in VS Code can be abused to quietly load plugins - it may come in handy during your initial access adventures! The Threat of VS Code Extensions It’s no secret that the popularity…
Updated February 13th, 2023 : The PACES certification has been renamed to ‘Certified Red Team Master’ (CRTM) and is now licensed by AlteredSecurity instead of PentesterAcademy, this blog post has been updated to reflect. Introduction The “Global Central Bank” (GCB) labs and accompanying “Certified Red Team Master” (CRTM) certification are definitely something…
Nim for offensive security For a while now I have been playing with the programming language Nim in the context of Offensive Security. Nim is a relatively young and fairly unknown programming language that has a syntax quite similar to Python’s, so is very easy to pick up. It however offers the flexibility and low-level capabilities of languages like C/C++, and has a great foreign function…
Introduction If you hang around the infosec “twittersphere” or in other security communities, odds are you have already seen someone share their experiences on the ‘Red Team Ops’ course by ZeroPointSecurity . I had heard a lot about this course prior to enrolling in it myself - almost exclusively consisting of positive reviews. The author of the course, RastaMouse , is…
Updated February 13th, 2023 : Some referenced courses are now licensed by AlteredSecurity instead of PentesterAcademy, this post has been updated to reflect. Introduction When Offensive Security announced the new PEN-300 course , also called “Evasion Techniques and Breaching Defenses”, the syllabus immediately intrigued me. The course promises to provide an advanced course, aimed at…
Last update: November 3rd, 2021 Updated November 3rd, 2021 : Included several fixes and actualized some techniques. Changes made to the Defender evasion, RBCD, Domain Enumeration, Rubeus, and Mimikatz sections. Fixed some whoopsies as well 🙃. Updated June 5th, 2021 : I have made some more changes to this post based on (among others) techniques discussed in ZeroPointSecurity’s ‘Red…
Updated February 13th, 2023 : The CRTP certification is now licensed by AlteredSecurity instead of PentesterAcademy, this blog post has been updated to reflect. Introduction As a red teamer -or as a hacker in general- you’re guaranteed to run into Microsoft’s Active Directory sooner or later. Almost every major organization uses Active Directory (which we will mostly refer to as…
The first part of this blog post dives into my personal OSCP story. If you’re only interested in stuff you can apply to your own PWK journey, jump to the key takeaways or the OSCP FAQ . Preamble I don’t have a very technical background. I did a Master’s in Information Science before starting as a Cyber Security Consultant. In my current role, I deal with various cyber topics on…
For some people, the reporting bit of the PWK course may be their pride and joy leading up to their OSCP certification. For others, it’s just a necessity that they want to get out of the way. Either way, handing in a report describing your findings is a requirement posed by Offensive Security - so you’re gonna have to do it if you want to obtain that elusive OSCP certification!
Updated May 18th, 2020 Since my OSCP certification exam is coming up, I decided to do a writeup of the commands and techniques I have most frequently used in the PWK labs and in similar machines. I aimed for it to be a basic command reference, but in writing it it has grown out to be a bit more than that! That being said - it is far from an exhaustive list. If you feel any important tips, tricks,…