Category: Lab Building

This is the sixth and final lab building post in the Building An Atomic Red Team Lab series. This is going to be our manage workstation – the one we’ll run our Atomic tests on. It’s a pretty straightfoward Windows 10 install, so let’s get started.

This post is part of my series on Building an Atomic Red Team Lab. This is the fifth part of this series where I’m going to document the installation process for the Active Directory Domain Controller. This will alsp be our DNS server as well.

Most enterprise networks are Windows Active Directory networks, so it’s good to be familiar with how to install, configure, break and fix them. We’re going to base the domain controller on Windows Server 2019 Standard Desktop Experience. So let’s get the Operating System installed.

This post is part of my series on Building an Atomic Red Team Lab. This is the fourth part of this series where I’m going to document the installation process for Hunting ELK (HELK). This is the first log, alerting and analysis system I’m going to look at.

HELK is a hunting platform built around the ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana technology stack. Logs are sent from the host system, using WinLogBeat, to the HELK server.

The logs from WinLogBeat first enter into the Kafka listener. Kafka is a distributed publish-subsscribe messaging system. From there, the lgos are parsed by Logstash and stored in an ElasticSearch database. These stored messages can be searched and displayed in dashboards using Kibana.

So now that we have a little understanding of how the system works, let’s dive in to the installation process.

This post is part of my series on Building an Atomic Red Team Lab. This is the second part of this series where I’m going to document the installation process for the Intrusion Detection System (IDS).

Operating System

Our Intrusion Detection System (IDS) will monitor the network traffic for suspicious or malicious traffic…which I’ll be generating. I’m going to use the new version of SecurityOnion for this.

SecurityOnion is a free and opensource IDS and network monitoring platform. It has a suite of tools installed by default: A full ELK stack, Zeek, Wazuh, Suricata, Snort, etc. You can use the latest Emerging Threats ruleset to grab the most recent threat signatures known in the wild.

SecurityOnion2 is based on CentOS 7, so we’ll use that to build the base VM.

This post is part of my series on Building an Atomic Red Team Lab. This is the first installation post where I’m going to document how I build, install and configure the central hub of the network.

Operating System

I’m going to be using vyOS. vyOS is a free and opensource firewall and router operating system. It’s a powerful platform, but there’s no GUI. It’s all CLI. I haven’t used it much so I’m excited to learn a new technology.

Dectection is one of the most critical stages of the Information Security processes. There will always be some new zero day exploit, so the ability to detect when an attack is operating on your network is critical.

The Atomic Red Team is an attack emulation toolkit to help you measure, monitor and improve your detection capabilities.

I wanted to build out an active directory lab environment to explore this toolkit and the detection capabilities of various logging systems. It’s going to be a very bare bones network, but should be enough to experiment with the framework.