Resources

Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Guide

The Financial Industry Threat Landscape: Top Threats and Proactive Security Best Practices

Money may or may not be the root of all evil, but it certainly seems to be the root of nearly all cyberattacks. This past year, 95% of attacks were financially motivated, according to the Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). It’s clear that any company that manages money – and especially those that are in charge of a lot of it – has a huge, dollar-sign target on their backs....
Blog

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...
Guide

Understanding Mobile Application Penetration Testing

Roughly 62% of businesses either have an app or are on their way to developing one. Most organizations understand the benefits of mobile apps -- they get information to customers faster and facilitate the online buying process, among other things. That said, not all businesses grasp the increased security risks that come from mobile applications. Fortunately, these risks are manageable with a...
Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Article

CVE-2024-6769: Poisoning the Activation Cache to Elevate From Medium to High Integrity

This blog is about two chained bugs: Stage one is a DLL Hijacking bug caused by the remapping of ROOT drive and stage two is an Activation Cache Poisoning bug managed by the CSRSS server.The first stage was presented in detail at Ekoparty 2023 in the presentation called "I'm High" by Nicolás Economou from BlueFrost Security. He explained how to exploit the vulnerability which, at the time, had not...
Guide

Decoding the Attacker Mindset: Pen Testing Revelations

Penetration testing is not simply about evaluating the security of an IT environment—it's about uncovering the attacker's playbook. By emulating the tactics of real-world attackers, security professionals can identify overlooked weaknesses, close gaps, and bolster their defenses with enhanced security controls. Featuring TLDRs and Takeaways for at...
Article

What’s New in Impacket 0.12?

Impacket 0.12 is now available! A lot of work has been done since version 0.11, and this new release includes improvements to libraries and examples, new examples, and more.Encoding UpdatesSome encoding issues were still present after transitioning from python 2 to python 3, primarily caused by transitions between bytes and str object types.Version 0.12 features encoding updates in several...
Article

Windows DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (CVE-2024-30051)

In this blog post, I will explain a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows Desktop Windows Manager (DWM) Core library that I analyzed when the exploit for Core Impact was being developed. This vulnerability allows an unprivileged attacker to execute code as a DWM user with Integrity System privileges (CVE-2024-30051).Since there was not enough public information at the time to develop the exploit,...
Article

CVE-2024-6768: Improper Validation of Specified Quantity in Input Produces an Unrecoverable State in CLFS.sys Causing a BSoD

IntroductionCVE-2024-6768 is a vulnerability in the Common Log File System (CLFS.sys) driver of Windows, caused by improper validation of specified quantities in input data. This flaw leads to an unrecoverable inconsistency, triggering the KeBugCheckEx function and resulting in a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). The issue affects all versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11, Windows Server 2016, Server...
Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Blog

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...
Datasheet

Core Impact 101 Training

Welcome to Core Impact Training 101. This training is designed to give you an in-depth overview of this tool’s powerful pen testing features and provides a wealth of information that can add to your skillset. There is something for everyone in this training, from new security team members just starting to implement pen testing, to the battle-hardened cybersecurity veterans that can further enhance...