7MS #502: Building a Pentest Lab in Azure

7MS #502: Building a Pentest Lab in Azure

Happy new year friends! Today I share the good, bad, ugly, and BROKEN things I've come across while migrating our Light Pentest LITE training lab from on-prem VMware ESXi to Azure. It has been a fun and frustrating process, but my hope is that some of the tips in today's episode will save you some time/headaches/money should you setup a pentesting training camp in the cloud.

Things I like

  • No longer relying on a single point of failure (Intel NUC, switch, ISP, etc.)

  • You can schedule VMs to auto-shutdown at a certain time each day, and even have Azure send you a notification before the shutdown so you can delay - or suspend altogether - the operation

Things I don't like

  • VMs are by default (I believe) joined to Azure AD, which I don't want. Here's how I got machines unjoined from Azure AD and then joined to my pwn.town domain:
dsregcmd /leave Add-Computer -DomainName pwn.town -Restart
  • Accidentally provision a VM in the wrong subnet? The fix may be rebuilding the flippin' VM (more info in today's episode).

  • Just about every operation takes for freakin' ever. And it's confusing because if you delete objects out of the portal, sometimes they don't actually disappear from the GUI for like 5-30 minutes.

  • Using backups and snapshots is archaic. You can take a snapshot in the GUI or PowerShell easy-peasy, but if you actually want to restore those snapshots you have to convert them to managed disks, then detach a VM's existing disk, and attach the freshly converted managed disks. This is a nightmare to do with PowerShell.

  • Deleting data is a headache. I understand Azure is probably trying to protect you against deleting stuff and not being able to get it back, but they night a right-click > "I know what I'm doing, DELETE THIS NOW" option. Otherwise you can end up in situations where in order to delete data, you have to disable soft delete, undelete deleted data, then re-delete it to actually make it go away. WTH, you say? This doc will help it make more sense (or not).

Things that are broken

  • Promiscuous mode - just plain does not work as far as I can tell. So I can't do protocol poisoning exercises with something like Inveigh.

  • Hashcat - I got CPU-based cracking working in ESXi by installing OpenCL drivers, but try as I may, I cannot get this working in Azure. I even submitted an issue to the hashcat forums but so far no replies.

On a personal note, it has been good knowing you because I'm about to spend all my money on a new hobby: indoor skydiving.

Episoder(684)

7MS #123: Doing a Redo Assessment

7MS #123: Doing a Redo Assessment

This episode talks about my experience in doing a "redo" security assessment, during which I struggled with the following questions: what's the best way to efficiently correct the erroneous information and make the customer happy without asking ALL the original questions over again? Especially when I have little to no time to prepare for the "redo" interview?

22 Des 20159min

7MS #122: OFFTOPIC-An Apology to Elephants

7MS #122: OFFTOPIC-An Apology to Elephants

Preview76 wordsThis episode is about a documentary called An Apology to Elephants. It's all about the treatment (or mistreatment) of elephants, and the main message of the movie is, "Please don't go to the circus when it's in town, because you're supporting elephant abuse." Even if that message was a little heavy handed, I certainly will pass on tickets next time a circus act comes through town. You can subscribe to the 7 Minute Security podcast here.

20 Des 20158min

7MS #121: Migrating from Tumblr to Ghost-Part 2

7MS #121: Migrating from Tumblr to Ghost-Part 2

Part 2 concludes my journey in moving 7ms.us from Tumblr to a Digital Ocean droplet running Ghost. Here are the key resources mentioned during the podcast: How to run multiple Ghost blogs on one DI VPS. The key takeaway here was that I had to upgrade to the $10 droplet (I did a "flexible" resize to add more proc/memory) and then the second instance of Ghost installed fine. Turning on CloudFlare SSL was easy. I chose flexible SSL since I wasn't using a "real" cert. I also wrote a rule to force HTTPs for all connections. And, just for grins, I turned on DNSSEC. Because...why not? :-) I picked a strong root password for my DI droplet, but I still don't like the idea of IPs banging on that connection all day and night. I followed this article on installing Fail2Ban to prevent my SSH login from being abused. There are a few IPs that I want to perma-ban, so I'm going to look throughthis article and this one which looks a tad easier. You can subscribe to the 7 Minute Security podcast here.

19 Des 20158min

7MS #120: THE PURGE!

7MS #120: THE PURGE!

Announcing the 7MS PURGE! I've got a back log of episodes banked and I want to get caught up for the new year. So I'm going to release one (or maybe more) episodes per day between now and 2016. Plus (spoiler alerts!) in 2016 we're moving to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday release schedule. Yep, 7MS three times a week - thanks for the idea, mom! Subscribe to 7MS on iTunes here.

18 Des 20152min

7MS #119: Migrating from Tumblr to Ghost-Part 1

7MS #119: Migrating from Tumblr to Ghost-Part 1

In this episode I talk about my adventures in moving my brianjohnson.tv Tumblr content over to a Digital Ocean hosted droplet running Ghost. I think you'll want to check this episode out, because in part 2 I talk about the challenges I faced in hosting multiple Ghost instances on one DI droplet. I will also be talking about how to enable CloudFlare SSL (for free!) as well as enabling Fail2Ban to keep annoying people/IPs from brute forcing your SSH root account!

17 Des 20158min

7MS #118: Should Phishing be Fair?

7MS #118: Should Phishing be Fair?

This episode discusses an important and rhetorical (to me) infosec question: Should phishing campaigns be "fair?"

15 Des 20157min

7MS #117: OFFTOPIC-Alive Inside

7MS #117: OFFTOPIC-Alive Inside

Today I talk about one of the most moving films I've ever seen - a documentary called Alive Inside.

10 Des 20157min

7MS #116: Tips for a Succesful Vulnerability Scan

7MS #116: Tips for a Succesful Vulnerability Scan

In this episode I complain about getting stuck in NY for two days, and also how to efficiently scan for vulnerabilities when your time is crunched.

8 Des 201514min

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