Offensive Security Foundations
A systematic and complete curriculum covering the foundations of Offensive Security. Includes competency development in topics of Red Team Operations, Offensive Tooling and Reverse Engineering.
Develop strong technical foundations in modern Red-Team Ops and Reverse Engineering specializations.
Who should take this course?
General beginners to the field or those looking to transition into Offensive Security with a focus on Windows platforms.
This is a foundational-level course intended to be a complete curriculum for obtaining practical and modern experience across various areas of Offensive Security, including common topics in specializations like Red-Team Operations and Reverse Engineering. This course will develop student capabilities to perform in roles across red teaming and reverse engineering jobs.
This course assumes little to no prior experience, with relevancy for students, interns, juniors, other IT-related disciplines, blue-teams and related defense teams (incl. threat intel) and various other backgrounds that may not have extensive existing Offensive Security knowledge.
This contrasts with our advanced courses that may build from existing foundational knowledge and experience.
Students that complete this course will have working knowledge of modern techniques and practical experience across Reverse Engineering and Offensive Red-Team Ops. This includes up-to-date and real-world experience tackling challenges and utilizing skills exercised by modern practitioners in the related specializations.
The ultimate goal of this course is to rapidly uplift students’ competencies in the aforementioned offensive security specializations into a level appropriate for professional workplace use or for pivoting into advanced research.
Basic exposure to programming languages is preferred (any including Python, C/C++, Rust, C#), but not required.
Windows 11 instance (VM or Host)
Certain sections may require virtualization software (any of VirtualBox, Hyper-V, VMware, etc)
Visual Studio Community 2022+ with the “Desktop development with c++” and “.NET desktop development” packages installed, and the “Windows 11 WDK” (instructions).
Extensive hands-on exercises, interweaved with theory. We strongly utilize challenge-based learning with complete walkthroughs and detailed insights into the development and design decision making progress for our solutions.
Exercises grounded in reality. Real targets are used where possible in place of contrived examples. Environments crafted by Signal Labs are designed based on live scenarios encountered during professional ops.
Structured lessons from the ground-up, including introductory computer science topics that naturally flow into our offensive security specializations.
Custom tooling developed by Signal Labs, provided for use.
Course Syllabus (Prerelease, Changes Permitting)
Computer Science Primer
- CPU
- Page Tables
- Caching
- Devices (MMIO & I/O)
- Privilege Management
- Multi-Core and Threading
- Faults and Interrupts
- Virtualization
- Operating Systems Design
Windows Primer
- Kernel / User Management
- Address Range Design
- Page Table Management
- Sanitization of Entry Points
- Binaries
- PE32/PE32+
- Subsystems and Interfaces
- Kernel
- Software-Enforced Access Control
- Tokens
- ACLs
- Impersonation
- Sessions
- Registry
- Automation
- Scheduled Tasks
- Services
- Misc Autoruns
- Active Directory
Programming Primer
- Managed vs Native
- Compilation and Linking
- Windows APIs
- Documentation
- Contracts
- Abstractions
- SDKs and WDKs
- Initial Examples
- C
- C++
- Rust
- Comparisons
- Debugging
- TTD
- Profiling
- Working with Assembly
- Signatures and Certificates
- Types and Enforcement
Reverse Engineering Foundations
- Overview and Purpose
- Alternatives
- Tooling Overview
- Anatomy
- Lifters and ILs
- Database and Internal Representations
- Usage
- Navigation, Views, Graphs
- Decompilation
- Stack Analysis
- Reversing for Undocumented Feature Detection
- Common Targets
- Services
- COM and RPC
- Kernel
- Resolving Common Issues
- Basic Scripting
- Binary Patching
Red Team Ops Foundations
- Overview
- Attack Lifecycle
- Planning Ops
- Managing Risk
- Playbooks
- Stakeholders
- Operation Styles
- Framework / Standards (CORIE, CBEST, TIBER, …)
- Team Compositions
- Asset Management
- Operational Concerns
- Infrastructure
- SSL
- Interception and Bypasses
- Authentication and Authorization
- Decoys and Evasion
- Exploiting the Human Factor
- SSL
- Analysis of Public Tooling
- Customization of Public Tooling
- Adopting Techniques with Minimal Knowledge / No Public Code
- Logging and Artefact Tracking
- Techniques
- Initial Access
- Privilege Escalation
- Lateral Movement
- Achieving Objectives
- Generating Noise
- Reporting
- Layout
- Common Mistakes
- Focus Areas
A systematic and complete curriculum covering the foundations of Offensive Security.
Includes competency development in topics of Red Team Operations and Reverse Engineering.
Each module contains extensive hands-on challenges and walkthroughs based on real environments, software targets and modern techniques.
Course Benefits
Beginner & Advanced Content with Live Demonstrations
Community Environment to Engage in Discussions with Peers & Instructor
Live Q&A Sessions & Ongoing Support After the Course
Frequently Updated Content with the Latest Techniques & Tools
Custom Code Developed by Signal Labs for Students
(Optional) Assessments & Completion Certificates
A firsthand look at our innovative self-paced course content.
Self-Paced Training
$550.00 USD
- Currently available for Pre-Order — Early Access Q3 2024 — Release ~Q4 2024 — Price increase at full-release.
- 12-month access to the course (early access not counted towards 12-month limit).
- Multiple hands-on exercises for each section.
- Structured layout building from key Computer Science topics into Reverse Engineering and Red-Team Ops specializations.
- Focus on Windows (and closed-source targets).
- Learn and leverage Rust for modern custom code development.
- Gain practical experience with the following:
- Reverse Engineering of arbitrary Windows code.
- Analysis and customization of open-source offensive tooling to avoid detections and patch weaknesses.
- Act across the entire red-team attack lifecycle including initial access, privilege escalation and lateral movement.
- Perform offensive operations following standards like CBEST, TIBER and CORIE.
- Dedicated area for 1:1 discussions with instructors.
- (Optional) Assessments & completion certificates.
- Note: Training platform access supports Windows and MacOS machines only.
*For larger business teams, reach out for custom packages.
Instructor
Christopher Vella has extensive experience with vulnerability research and has found vulnerabilities in a range of high-profile software (Hyper-V Hypervisor, Adobe PDF, Windows OS & Kernel). Public vulnerabilities discovered by Christopher include (CVE-2020-17414, CVE-2020-24559, CVE-2021-25250, CVE-2020-24557, CVE-2020-24556, CVE-2020-24558, + more) alongside multiple non-public vulnerabilities.
Strong Signals
