Weaponizing Vulnerabilities

The goal of weaponizing vulnerabilities is to take advantage of a single vulnerability or set of vulnerabilities that can be chained to get elevated access to a system. Despite the safeguards already in place, every system or equipment within a firm may have vulnerabilities. This encompasses not only all physical hardware, such as desktop computers, laptops, and servers, but also all virtual platforms, cloud-based resources, mobile devices, and more. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) (opens in new tab) claims that the rate at which vulnerabilities have been discovered has increased recently.

An exploit may be utilized in conjunction with additional exploits or vulnerabilities for the attacker to take control of a system they are targeting. Even though a vulnerability's impact isn't as significant as another that is more difficult to access, it might still be quite simple to attack. Suppose the exploit is adequately implemented and managed. In that case, these low-level vulnerabilities might grant cyber attackers access that will allow them to enter networks and systems further and exploit other flaws that could be harder to access directly. This idea is called multi-stage exploitation or exploit chaining, which will be discussed briefly in this room.

Another closely related room, Weaponization, focuses on various techniques that assist the red team in building custom payloads using scripting languages like PSH, HTA, VBA, and others. However, in this room, we also consider the defensive part as a security engineer and illustrate how bad guys combine vulnerabilities to gain complete control of a system through a case study. Moreover, this room also focuses on the core theoretical concepts necessary for a security engineer to understand how the exploit development cycle works.