Red Cell Security Operations Team

A while back we ran an advance for a principal who was certain his risk started the moment he stepped out his front door. Route was tight. Venue was swept. The detail was sharp and the man leading it was good. Then we asked what was installed on his vehicles and got a shrug. A dealer had bolted an aftermarket alarm under the dash years earlier, nobody on the team knew it was there, and not one person could tell us what it talked to or who else had ever touched its settings. That shrug is the...

Earlier this year attackers went after Amazon's cloud in the Middle East and never touched a server. They used drones. They hit the power and the supporting infrastructure the facilities depend on, damaged nearby systems around Bahrain, and knocked capacity offline across multiple availability zones. No zero-day. No stolen credential. No malware. Just the oldest idea in warfare, which is that you break the thing your enemy leans on and let the rest fall over on its own. We have spent years on...

Three hours. That's how long it took to go from standing outside a data center fence to dumping domain credentials from a VSS shadow copy. Not three days. Not three weeks of patient phishing campaigns and careful lateral movement. Three hours, start to finish, in broad daylight. The Setup A client hired us for a physical target assessment of a remote data center. The engagement included a network penetration test component, but with a catch—we only got to touch the network if we could obtain...