The idea for this assessment came from one of the IT managers at this organization. She wasn't sure people were taking her training seriously, and she wanted to see whether our team could get inside the server room and walk with a drive from one of their servers. Bonus points would be given if we could also take over at least one of the employee's laptops.
After a week of both physical and digital recon, we had solid information that allowed us to create plan. It was going to be a combination of attacks on all fronts: physical, digital and social.
We learned 3 key things on the recon: the back alley on their main building had no camera, the service door there was guarded by a single padlock, and their fire command system (as per the information online), would make the doors "fail open" when it was being reset.
The following week, in middle of most employees coming in, I walked very casually around the building, on the phone "on an important call that needed a little quiet", and reached the service entrance on the back. There, and without anyone looking, picked the lock on the padlock and went into the building. A few minutes later, another guy from the team came by the door and lock the padlock again. Nothing to see... Move along... Any roaming guard will see all as usual.
Onde inside, I put on my fake badge on my belt, and dressed with a suit and tie began walking. After checking the ground floor and going 2 floors up, I found a room filled with racks of servers, routers, and other network devices. Of course it needed badge access. OK, time for the social attack. I called another guy from the team that was waiting by a cafe a few blocks away.
In the meantime, no one challenged me. I was dressed with a suit and tie, I had laptop with me and a pad of paper where I had made some quick diagrams (that said nothing, but looked very official). A few guys said hello with a smile, and one even helped me get a coffee on the small kitchen on the floor.
When R arrived at the front desk, he was dressed on a very convincing fire department uniform. He talked to the security guard and told him that the fire command box was sending alerts to them every 30 min or so, that clearly all was good at the locaiton, but that he needed to see the fire command system. The guard walked with him to the security office, and opened the fire command box. After a few min, R dialed a number on his cellphone (I answered), he said: I think it's all good, we might need to reset the box. Let me know if you see the reset on your end.
He asked the guard to insert his key on the box, turn it and R hit the reset control. It took a few seconds for the box for go down and reboot. He talked to me on the phone: box was reset, can you see it? At that point, all the doors on the floow popped open. I walked into the servers room and said: I'm inside. Let it boot all the way.
R thanks the guard with a smile and while walking always, he commented on the football game for a few minutes. The guard was wearing a football hat and by doing this, he was making the guard feel at ease. An extra step to make sure he wasn't going to get suspicious.
Now I needed to find a drive to remove, and I needed to find a way to "own" one of the laptops. The disk was easy, some of the racks had hot-swappable drives. I searched for one that was labelled "backup" and took it.
The next thing was to find a way to get a laptop. This was done, again, by exploiting the helpful nature of humans. I walked to one of the desks in front of a closed-door office. These desks are usually occupied by assistants to execs, or directors. I found there a mid 40s lady, very well dressed and with "great hairdo". I commented, just passing by, how beautiful she looked and that it must have taken her a while to get her hair so good. She smile a big smile and told me ALL about it. We were having a good chat here. Just as I was leaving, I asked her: I'm having trouble accessing my powerpoints on my computer. I don't whether it's my computer or the thumdrive. Any chance I can check on yours one second?
She smiled and allowed me to kneel by her side, accessing her laptop. I plugged the USB drive, and opened it on her computer. I saw my powerpoint, opened it, but it was greated by a "corrupted file" error. So, I told her thank you and that I was clear my drive was bad. Meanwhile, behind the scenes I had now a backdoor to her laptop. A simple reverse shell that was trying to connect to a specific IP, disguised as an HTTP request. I walked away, smiling and waving goodbye.
Back in the office, the guys where receiving a shell.
Boom. We got them.
So, this one went smooth. Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. The recon, the fact that the company leaked so much of their digital footprint online (from vendors to what software their were using), and a good solid plan that attacked the 3 fronts at the same time, allowed us to really go in and succeed.
It's not this easy most of the times. You have things not working, you have people getting suspicious, you have security controls, and a million other things. However, sometimes... Well, it just works.