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Core Impact Quarterly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | Q1 2025

Core Impact Updates New Release: Core Impact 21.7Core Impact 21.7 is now available! This release sees the introduction of the new agent transformation callbacks, a newer UI for the entity's creation dialogs, a series of quality-of-life changes, and more.A more extensive post will be published detailing all the new features and their use cases. Core Impact Exploit Library AdditionsOne of Core...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | December 2024-January 2025

Core Impact Exploit Library AdditionsOne of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library, maintained by a team (formerly Core Labs) within the Fortra Intelligence & Research Experts (FIRE) group. This team conducts in-depth research to evaluate and prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities, ensuring the library is updated with high-impact, reliable exploits that enable...
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Core Impact and Cobalt Strike: Distinct Strengths, Enhanced Combination

Given its functionality as a multifaceted toolset, there are some features of Core Impact that users may not have taken advantage of. In this post, we’ll talk about SOCKS tunneling. Namely, we’ll walk through use cases of Core Impact’s SOCKS proxy capabilities and how to use it together with Cobalt Strike.What is SOCKS Tunneling?SOCKS Tunneling allows operators to run Core Impact modules and...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | November 2024

Core Impact Exploit Library Additions One of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library. Fortra’s Core Security has a team of expert exploit writers that conduct research, evaluating and prioritizing the most relevant vulnerabilities in order to update the library with critical and useful exploits. Additionally, the QA team creates its own clean environment to validate...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | October 2024

Core Impact Updates NTMLrelayx MultiRelay and Keep-Relaying Support The latest update to Impacket 0.12 introduces the MultiRelay and keep-relaying modes, allowing users to run relays for extended periods and analyze captured connections for each target. The NTLMrelayx module will continuously relay new incoming connections until manually stopped. This feature, combined with the Connection Store...
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How to Proactively Harden Your Environment Against Compromised Credentials

According to NordPass, the average user maintains an average of 168 logins for personal purposes, and no less than 87 for the workplace. This is an extraordinary amount to keep safe, and threat actors realize that it’s only a matter of time before users make a wrong move and enter those credentials somewhere they’re not supposed to. And this is why, inevitably, they manage to swipe them and sneak...
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Are You Prepared for Ransomware IRL?

Most ransomware prevention advice focuses on antivirus software and other defenses, such as having good detection and response (DR) mechanisms. All of these are important. But with the advanced level of ransomware today, you also need to take measures that test your defenses and DR strategies to ensure the measures you have in place will hold up to a real-life advanced attack. Working in Theory vs...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | August & September 2024

Core Impact Exploit Library AdditionsOne of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library. Fortra’s Core Security has a team of expert exploit writers that conduct research, evaluating and prioritizing the most relevant vulnerabilities in order to update the library with critical and useful exploits. Additionally, the QA team creates its own clean environment to validate...
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Core Impact 21.6: Take Control with Connection Store

Core Impact 21.6 is now available. This release sees the introduction of the Connection Store, new reporting features, a newer UI for the entities Quick Information panel, a series of quality-of-life changes and more.(Re)Relay connections through the Connection StoreOnce intercepted, connections are a very valuable asset for pen testers. There are many advantages to connections, even independently...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | July 2024

Core Impact Exploit Library AdditionsOne of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library. Fortra’s Core Security has a team of expert exploit writers that conduct research, evaluating and prioritizing the most relevant vulnerabilities in order to update the library with critical and useful exploits. Additionally, the QA team creates its own clean environment to validate...
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3 Components of a Proactive Security Strategy 

Your organization might have many cybersecurity defenses in place, but defenses alone are not enough to protect you from today’s multi-faceted cyberattacks. Proactively adding a layer of offensive security assessment and testing helps you pinpoint your system weaknesses before they are exploited. Proactive security measures help you stay ahead of attackers by: Identifying vulnerabilities and...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | June 2024

Core Impact Exploit Library AdditionsOne of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library. Fortra’s Core Security has a team of expert exploit writers that conduct research, evaluating and prioritizing the most relevant vulnerabilities in order to update the library with critical and useful exploits. Additionally, the QA team creates its own clean environment to validate...
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CISO Commentary: The Art of Patching

Recently, Core Security released the 2024 Penetration Testing Report, which shares the results from an annual survey of cybersecurity professionals on their experiences with offensive security strategies and solutions. In this series, we’re taking a deeper dive into some of the most noteworthy findings from the survey, with expert insights from Fortra’s CISO, Chris Reffkin, and Lead Product...
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CISO Commentary: Budgeting for Offensive Security

Recently, Core Security released the 2024 Penetration Testing Report, which shares the results from an annual survey of cybersecurity professionals on their experiences with offensive security strategies and solutions. In this series, we’ll take a deeper dive into some of the most noteworthy findings from the survey, with expert insights from Fortra’s CISO, Chris Reffkin, and Lead Product Manager...
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CISO Commentary: How Often Should You Pen Test?

Recently, Core Security released the 2024 Penetration Testing Report, which shares the results from an annual survey of cybersecurity professionals on their experiences with offensive security strategies and solutions. In this series, we’ll take a deeper dive into some of the most noteworthy findings from the survey, with expert insights from Fortra’s CISO, Chris Reffkin, and Lead Product Manager...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | May 2024

Core Impact UpdatesNew UI and Usability Improvements for Reports The Core Impact Reports have been modernized, with data reviewed to improve its actionability and user friendliness.Phishing Attacks Efficiency ImprovementsThe links generated by Core Impact for phishing attacks and client-side exploits have had IOCs removed. Additionally, running simulations has been simplified and reduces the risk...
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Weighing the Risk: The Cost of Skipping Pen Tests

Cybersecurity budgets are beginning to get cut across the country, and organizations are faced with tough choices about what should stay and what should go. As security budgets face extra scrutiny and potential cuts, it’s critical to evaluate the cost and benefits of each security practice. It can be difficult to define the value of proactive security solutions like pen testing, as a precise ROI...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | April 2024

Core Impact UpdatesSMB NTLM Information Dumper This module improves the reconnaissance step for Active Directory testing, specifically gathering NTLM information using SMB/RPC protocols to prepare NTLMrelayx Man-in-the-middle attacks. Among other information, it retrieves: SMB Signing configuration information Domain configuration SMB Shares Out of the box tags for known server roles This update...
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Core Impact Monthly Chronicle: Exploits and Updates | March 2024

Core Impact Exploit Library AdditionsOne of Core Impact’s most valuable features is its certified exploit library. Fortra’s Core Security has a team of expert exploit writers that conduct research, evaluating and prioritizing the most relevant vulnerabilities in order to update the library with critical and useful exploits. Additionally, the QA team creates its own clean environment to validate...
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Advantages of Offensive Security Vendor Consolidation

We sat down with John Stahmann, CISSP and Director of Sales Engineering for Offensive Security and Infrastructure Protection at Fortra, and asked him what he had learned after more than 20 years in the industry about the pitfalls, hacks, and little-known facts of offensive security. With so much architectural complexity, vendor sprawl, and multi-platform problems plaguing the cybersecurity...