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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Just to summarise what's going on here, because it took me a little bit of clicking to get the gist of it:

> The goal of the LOLBAS project is to document every binary, script, and library that can be used for Living Off The Land techniques.

> The phrase "Living off the land" was coined by Christopher Campbell (@obscuresec) & Matt Graeber (@mattifestation) at DerbyCon 3.

> The term LOLBins came from a Twitter discussion on what to call binaries that can be used by an attacker to perform actions beyond their original purpose.

So it seems like a catalogue of (possible?) exploits in commonly-available executables, libraries and scripts that may already be present on a target machine.

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> So it seems like a catalogue of (possible?) exploits in commonly-available executables, libraries and scripts that may already be present on a target machine

That is pretty correct, but it is not necessarily an exploit or vulnerability in the binary. More often than not, it is a quirk or a way to use the binary which is unknown/uncommon, but might not appear on a defenders' radar.

We generally try to (ab)use functionality in pre-existing software to avoid security mechanisms (like AppLocker) and detections (like AV/EDR, or rules created by a SOC when analysing execution logs in a SIEM). Often we discover that a target computer has been hardened in some form or fashion, and we have to get "creative" when trying to download, execute or exfiltrate data during security assessments.

Apologies I didn't mean to imply there was some nefarious purpose behind this!

well, no, it's 100% nefarious purpose, just sometimes used to find the holes instead of exploiting it.

It will absolutely be used more often to exploit than to secure

Or sometimes a person shows up at a new IT job and the old admin didn't leave behind any notes and the only way to do the job at all short of rebuilding everything from the ground up is to pwn the network.

They're for penetration testing and red vs blue teams.

Red is typically 'mischief' and Blue is typically 'mischief prevention.'

It’s dual use, like Metasploit. It’s hard to predict whether black hats or white hats will use it more often or not. I think your conclusion is more intuitive, but let me play devil’s advocate.

LotL is too advanced for script kiddies to pull off. You’re already dealing with an adversary with some sophistication, who likely have the time, skill, and resources to create their own LOLbins (or buy them on darknet forums). Infosec is an asymmetric conflict: the adversary has a much easier job IMO. It’s always easier to break something than to build it.

Blue/purple teams have little incentive to build their own LOLbins. There is another asymmetry here: blue teams are developing these to target only their networks. Red teams are developing them to target every network. Open source is the way to resolve that asymmetry.

With these becoming public, blue teams can simulate a LotL attack, develop indicators of attack, and write rules to trigger alerts.

In general, adversaries prefer their tricks to remain trade secrets. Once they’re known, documented, and commodified, they become far less useful.

I'm not saying that it is bad those are out, I'm saying by volume they'd be used more by "slightly advanced script kiddies", and as part of bigger tools.

Sure it might make it easier for red teams to help secure system, but for organizations bad at security they will be hit by that low hanging fruit methods, even if it might make more aware organizations more secure. Just because it lowers the point of entry.

Yep, and to make it even more clear as an author of one of these LOLBins (Squirrel.exe), I have to underscore this point again - this list doesn't apply to normal Windows installations, it is only meaningful in the context of Blue teams trying to create their own hardened security boundaries via AV/EDR/AppLocker, and Red teams trying to evade said tools

(inb4 the comments, Squirrel itself attempts to strike a balance between usability and security, running only as the current user without admin limits its potential to be exploited, since any "I can hack Squirrel to run my code" trick is "Rather Involved Being On The Same Side Of The Airtight Hatch", as Raymond Chen would say)

Wow, I had no idea what any of that meant. I thought these were scripts helpful for... the tiny fraction of people that work in tech, but live off the grid?

I didn’t know these compiled lists like this existed and I’m like old…

I’ve been manually going to find this kind of documentation since forever. This is great and so helpful

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