This week, Zac sits down with John Baek. John is the OG mentor to many of the folks already on this podcast as well as the leadership at SEVN-X. Zac and John discuss a few fun stories about our upbringing and then we launch straight into the "waterworks."
Episode Summary
In Episode 12 of War Stories, host Zac Davis sits down with John Baek, the original mentor to many of the testers who have appeared on this podcast and to SEVN-X's own leadership. They trade stories about the early days, talk about the custom command and control tooling John built, and walk through an internal penetration test that reached domain admin before lunch on the first day.
John remembers a young Matt Barnett as a talker who learned fast, and talks about what it was like leading a team of eager new testers. His favorite tool is command and control software, including the custom bot he wrote that kept working long after anyone expected. Michael Sviben talks about that same bot in Episode 9.
The main war story shows how fast a weak password policy can unravel a network. A public staff directory gave the team a full list of usernames, and a password spray with a seasonal password found five working accounts within minutes. From there they logged into the Citrix environment, recovered a local administrator password stored in Group Policy Preferences, and found a domain administrator logged in. About fifteen minutes in, they called the client to say they already had domain admin. The episode closes with the team's favorite running joke about absurd physical test diversions, like releasing a bunch of bats into the office.
In This Episode
- John Baek on mentoring the original crew behind SEVN-X
- Custom command and control (C2) tools and remote access tooling
- Building username lists from public staff directories
- Password spraying with seasonal passwords
- Citrix access, Group Policy Preferences passwords, and reaching domain admin in minutes
How Long Would Your Network Hold Out?
Weak passwords and legacy settings like Group Policy Preferences still lead to fast domain compromise. SEVN-X runs internal and external penetration tests and red team engagements that find these gaps before attackers do. Talk with our team about scoping a test for your organization.
