Microsoft Threat Hunting

Azure Serial Console Attack and Defense - Part 2

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

This is the second installment of the Azure Serial Console blog, which provides insights to improve defenders’ preparedness when investigating Azure Serial Console activity on Azure Linux virtual machines. While the first blog post discussed various tracing activities, such as using Azure activity and Sysmon logs on Windows virtual machines to trace serial console activity, this blog outlines how to enable logging for Azure Linux virtual machines using Sysmon for Linux to capture and how to send these events to a log analytics workspace.

• Security Research
• Microsoft Threat Hunting
• Azure Serial Console

Azure Serial Console Attack and Defense - Part 1

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Ever had a virtual machine crash? Azure Serial console is a great way to directly connect to your Virtual machine and debug what went wrong. Azure Serial Console is a feature that’s available for free for everyone. While the primary intent of this feature is to assist users debug their machine, there are several interesting ways to abuse the features and compromise sensitive information.

• Security Research
• Microsoft Threat Hunting
• Azure Serial Console

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Threat Hunting

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

As more businesses shift away from running workloads on dedicated virtual machines to running them inside containers using workload orchestrators like Kubernetes, adversaries have become more interested in them as targets. Moreover, the benefits Kubernetes provides for managing workloads are also extended to adversaries. As adversaries leverage Kubernetes to run their workloads, their understanding of how these platforms work and can be exploited increases.

• Azure
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Microsoft Threat Hunting

Configuring host-level audit logging for AKS VMSS

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

This blog post runs you through how to enable and configure Linux audit logging on your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) using the Linux auditing subsystem, also known as auditd. Warning The information provided below is accurate as of the release date of this blog post (2023-03) and guidance may change in future.

• Azure
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Microsoft Threat Hunting

Hunting for Cobalt Strike: Mining and plotting for fun and profit

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Introduction Cobalt Strike is a commercial Command and Control framework built by Helpsystems. You can find out more about Cobalt Strike on the MITRE ATT&CK page. But it can also be used by real adversaries. In this post we describe how to use RiskIQ and other Microsoft technologies to see if you have Cobalt Strike payloads (also called “beacons”) in your network.