Author: Aemilianus Kehler

Posted on

Outlook and the Cache Mode

The Story

Wouldn’t be another post without another day of annoyances… yup, just another day. So recently it’s been reported that when users are working remotely their outlook decides not to open….

Now since they are remote, I have noticed this only happens if the Outlook client is configured in “Online mode”, instead of “Exchange Cached Mode”… see this MS Docs for more information on the different types and when to utilize each mode.

Originally I configured Online Mode, as most users are locally available in the work network and this is not a major problem. Also when using “Cache mode” not all emails show up in Outlook right away, specially if using folders, there generally shows a link “Click here to view more on Microsoft Exchange” this means items that were not cached (depending on the cache time slider this may vary, I choose 12 months), view this support if you can’t see the link in cache mode enabled.

I used to have an issue with this setting, user reported items wouldn’t load even after clicking the link, however I haven’t seen this to be an issue anymore, so I recommend to enable Outlook Cache mode unless you fall under the other points in MS’s Doc linked above.

Finding Users That Are Not Using Cache Mode

So I was now on a new mission… “How do I know who’s not using Cache mode on outlook?” And this is were the rabbit hole began….

First result, same question…

Craig Harts reply…

his or response seem like it’s rather easy until…

wtf is this…? Depreciated?!?! C’mon, but there’s an alternative now that’s better right? No…. Thanks MS… seriously… thanks…

So this older post goes over alternatives, not because they didn’t have access to the cmdlet above, but simply cause they didn’t trust the results.. huh…

Problem is this seem to be reg keys used by older outlook, and new outlook seems to use alternative keys… This sure is fun! However, thanks to others that blog and code in their spare time as well, in this case thanks to Jose Espitia much like in my last blog post this is a great start, but usual me, I don’t like expecting anyone to change the source code. In this case you have to provide a file with a computer list, output path, but it’s hard coded…. OK you know what that means! Yeah I usually would create a new GitHub Repo but first…

Much like the older post mentioned they choose to target end user directly to get the most “accurate data”. This however assumes four things:

  1. That Exchange admins are workstation admins, and have elevated rights on all machines.
  2. That all firewalls are configured and permissions to allow remote querying.
  3. That the user’s are in fact online at the time the query is made.
  4. That RemoteRegistry Service is started and running on end machines.

In my Case it was not and disabled on all machines, I didn’t feel it was beneficial enough to introduce a risk for the simple sake of determining a users connection mode on Outlook.

So I decided to go back to Option A from the old original post, parsing all the RPC Access logs… Using this an alternative reference.

Well I gave it a try and looking through all th elogs there was no reference to “Classic” so I guess that’s no longer valid option either.

Looks like I’m stuck on this one, I can’t seem to find a valid way to find this information out server side with MS removal of the Get-LoggingStatistics cmdlet. And attempting to query all ends users has to many restrictions/hoops that I do not wish to implement. In this case I have to simply go around to all users machines, or wait for the to complain when they work remotely.

Thanks Microsoft I really love what your doing for SysAdmins. Taking away mark and putting him on as COO of Azure so all our beautiful tools from SysInternals are now just the way they are, and new tools, don’t need em right, just buy your cloud subscriptions and who needs SysAdmins… 😛

Anyway… that’s it for today. Sorry no advanced scripts form this post, just use Jose’s script if you wish to query end users machines. Just ensure you have RemoteRegistry service running on all end users machines, and not blocking it in the firewall as well. Hoops I have no interest in jumping through.

Cheers!

Posted on

Powershell fun

PowerShell

Finding specific files

The Folder path in which you need to search
$Path = ‘C:\folder\path’

The Regular Expression you like to match
$RegEx = ‘[^-\w\.]’

The CSV File name
$OutCSV=’C:\temp\fileResults.csv’

Get-ChildItem -Path $Path -Recurse | Where-Object -FilterScript { $_.Name -match $RegEx } | Export-Csv -Path $OutCSV -NoTypeInformation

 

And YA! files modified in the last 24 hrs…

Get-ChildItem -Path $Path -Recurse | Where-Object -FilterScript { ((get-date) - $_.LastWriteTime).totalhours -le 24 } | Export-Csv -Path $OutCSV -NoTypeInformation

Finding Objects Properties

I used to use

$Object | FT *

to try and find properties to use, but easier is

$Object | get-Member

So much easier to see all an objects properties, and methods… and whatever 😀

There are obviously endless things you can do with powershell, with a syntax farrrrrrrrr more intuitive then BATCH ever was. That is really thanks to a lot of object operations relying on non other then regular expressions AKA RegEx.

RegEx is powerfull but also hard to grasp at times. Which funny enough has caused this blogger an unknown grief :P, though someone suggests not to use $ in between double quotes but for single quotes.. but it’s not “just that easy” as understanding the difference between using single quotes and double quotes is a big thing in PowerShell and understanding this as PowerShell as much as the RegEx underneith has it’s own special synatx on certain things and certain characters, so not only does PowerShell interpreter have it’s own parser with escape characters… So does RegEx so you have to know the info in the above link, as well as understand RexEx’s syntax, special characters, and escape characters specially when using operators like -like -match -contains or even -AllMatches…

Finding Files With Specific Characters

Outside of setting variables this really comes down to one line in the alternative bloggers script… line 8…

$item.Name | Select-String -AllMatches $UnsupportedChars

Nice, so simple, but as mentioned this breaks if you attempt just specific special characters, such as $ or ^ as these are special characters to RegEx and need to otherwise be escaped to be taken literally.

Now the script in and of itself is simple enough to accomplish a simple task.. to explain in better detail what I mean… here’s my list of files, NTFS accepts more strange characters then I first though, so users can really be creative…

clearly much more complex, so if I run his script what happens….

Now I commented out the line that actually renames the files, so you know, I don’t have to rename them to reset my test. That’s good, but even though he added the money sign in his blog to the “$UnsupportedChars” var, he didn’t actually add it in the final script, and what happens if you do?

ok so in this case, the -AllMatches worked without issues I suppose due to changing to single quotes. but what if we need to change it’s character, let’s copy one of his ifs that changes it and see how it responds…

The results…

hahahha that’s a lot of money, clearly the RegEx got confused when we specified $ in the -Replace operations… so as the source RegEx escape characters says, escape it with \…. lets do that…

Awesome it worked… but I don’t like edited a script every time I need a slight change in my search criteria…. let’s take his script… and well completely redesign it as if it were on Steroids!!! Functions! – to reuse reusable code with returns! Write-Hosts and Read-Hosts for user interaction and input, and heck why not options on results! Export, List, rename sounds good! This along with some dependency checking! (Does the path exist? Do you have rights to modify?)… oh yeah and confirmation of action! 😛

This beast will need it’s own GitHub Repo… so… here it is!

OK… now that I’m actually writing this blog actively while I’m polishing my script.. I noticed my export section had a Try, Catch for the creation of the CSV file. Simple but this, in itself, is not actually checking if I have permission… it’s simply checking to see if the I/O operation is actually able to succeed… it may fail due to other reasons (store space for example). So how do I check to see if I actually have permission before continuing? Well check your group membership (along with your own SID) and check the files/folders Access Control Lists (ACLs), obviously.

So how do I get a workaround based machines local user group membership?

Googling I can find easy how to do this for a domain joined machine, which is fantastic if I wanted to validate the path on a network share where the ACE’s and ACL’s are all managed by domain SIDs. But this test and script is all on my “workgroup” machine… and finally after enough searching the holy grail!

Wasn’t done directly by Ed Wilson but close enough, it gave the the code I needed to check the members of the local admin group, but what I really need is simply to validate read/write permissions.. So I found this… and sadly it doesn’t understand the fully distinguished user name when using whoami as the user variable… and it can’t sense inherited permissions… only once I granted my akadmin direct read and execute permissions would the code work…

Like ughhhhhhhhhhh………

I’m gonna skip this in my script for now… rather work on getting export to work properly, and actually getting the rename code in when saying yes. :O.. will update this post when that’s done.

… and yet in my drunken’ stuper I decide to keep trying…

I think the only way is only to iterate through the local groups and verify users.. nope leaving this again, unless a better way comes about.

OK.. so I felt I was on to something…

figured there’s got to be an easy way to do the same cmd as whoami /groups in PowerShell right… wtf is going on here?!?! I thought PowerShell was the easier scripting language… man this is crazy. and this

Not even brah… THIS! This is getting close!

This is gon’ be fun! (Great Source)

$folder = "c:\temp"
$CP = New-Object Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal([Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent())
$UGM = $CP.Identities.Groups | ?{$_.AccountDomainSid -ne $null}
$UGM = $UGM + $CP.Identities.User
$TPP = (Get-Acl $folder).Access
foreach ($P in $TPP.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]))
{
foreach ($UP in $UGM){if($UP -eq $P){Write-Host "We got permissions here!`n";$TPP | ?{$_.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) -match $P}}}
}

Testing this out on my the account I added to a group worked just fine, but on my main machine it failed on me…

Poop, what happened… turned out my code filters the nitty gritty built in groups. By default all users are a part of these and aren’t generally used to define permissions (but can be, E.G Administrators). Since there was only one group my account was a member of the PS Object “$UGM” was not of a multi-value object aka an array object and doesn’t have an addition type method to complete the addition of the user SID, to the what should be array, as I have not defined it as such. So this is a good example to usually always define your variable types or fault to the problems they can inhibit. Also I was stunned I was not able to see the group SID when I called for all local groups, no matter how I called them, so doing the magic translate trick as the source above…

What the heck… None … didn’t even know such a group existed…

Code fixed by doing the following:

$folder = "c:\temp"

$CP = New-Object Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal([Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent())
$UGM = @($CP.Identities.Groups | ?{$_.AccountDomainSid -ne $null})
$UGM = $UGM + $CP.Identities.User
$TPP = (Get-Acl $folder).Access 
foreach ($P in $TPP.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier])) 
{
 foreach ($UP in $UGM){if($UP -eq $P){Write-Host "We got permissions here!`n";$TPP | ?{$_.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) -match $P}}} 
}

After enough beers I got it to even let the user know if they are in the admins group but not elevated 🙂

$folder = "c:\temp\None"

$CP = New-Object Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal([Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent())
$UGM = @($CP.Identities.Groups | ?{$_.AccountDomainSid -ne $null})
$UGM = $UGM + $CP.Identities.User
if(([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal] [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()).IsInRole([Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole] "Administrator")){$UGM = $UGM + ($CP.Identities.Groups | ?{$_.Value -eq "S-1-5-32-544"})}

$TPP = (Get-Acl $folder).Access

foreach ($P in $TPP.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]))
{
    foreach ($UP in $UGM){if($UP -eq $P){Write-Host "We got permissions here!";$TPP | ?{$_.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) -match $P}}}
}

foreach($pu in (Get-LocalGroup Administrators | Get-LocalGroupMember).SID){if($pu -eq $CP.Identities.User -And !([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal] [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()).IsInRole([Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole] "Administrator")){Write-Host "You are an admin, but you are not elevated..."}}

Fixing the CSV Export

So far I have not go the permission checking working just yet. I have however managed to fix the export-csv issue.. old export…

Yeah that System.Object[] isn’t very helpful..

based on this old code:

$shit | Select-Object Name, Directory, MatchedValue| Export-Csv -Path $CSVFile -NoTypeInformation

I was trying all these weird things to try n resolve it (bad ideas)…

a lot of extra code for not good results, I figured there had to be a better way… and sure enough there was… Source

which left me with this code:

 $BadFiles | Select-Object Name, Directory, @{Expression={$_.MatchedValue -join ';'}} | Export-Csv -Path $CSVFile -NoTypeInformation

which now provides this output:

Nice! Until the moment I realized, can user use ; in file names… Ahhh they can! shoot! So now my test files grows larger, but my script help up with very lil modification! first to add it in the list of searchable characters:

function GetChars()
{
    Write-host "Characters to search for !$'&{^,}~#%][);( " -ForegroundColor Magenta -NoNewline
    $UnsupportedChars = Read-Host
    if ( !$UnsupportedChars ){ $UnsupportedChars = "\]!$'&{^,+}~#%[);(" }
    return $UnsupportedChars
}

That was it! the list output is fine:

but the export not so much as I was using ; to join those items…

K well users can use a \ so let’s see if we can use that in the export, again easy code change..

$BadFiles | Select-Object Name, Directory, @{Expression={$_.MatchedValue -join ';'}} | Export-Csv -Path $CSVFile -NoTypeInformation

Let’s test…

Nice, also added =, and let’s also test for @…

easy got em… until I realized you can name a file with a backtack `

and if I search for it on it’s own no problem…

but if I try to extend the default list of characters, I can’t seem to get it to work, even if I specify an escape \ in my list… Woah! I randomly got it!

function GetChars()
{
    Write-host "Characters to search for !$'&{^,}~#%]`[)@=;( " -ForegroundColor Magenta -NoNewline
    $UnsupportedChars = Read-Host
    if ( !$UnsupportedChars ){ $UnsupportedChars = "\]!$'&{^,+}~#%[)@=;(``" }
    return $UnsupportedChars
}

Double backticks worked, what a random thing to try and it actually worked…

That’s it for tonight! I got pretty much every special character covered. 🙂

Next time I want to cover bulk confirmation with a report, since confirming every one can be annoying, but better to have confirmation then not!

PIssssss!!!!! Source of problem

Oi! I DID IT!!! YES!

From this…

        if(confirm $turd.name $turd.NameToChange)
        {
            Try { Rename-Item $turd.name -NewName ($turd.NameToChange) }
            Catch { Centeralize "Unable to change file's name"$turd.name "Red"}
        }
        else
        {
            Write-Host "Maybe Another time..."
        }

to this (after exporting to it’s own function though)…

        if(confirm $turd.name $turd.NameToChange)
        {
            
            $ThatOldName = $turd.FullName
            if (($ThatOldName).ToCharArray() -ccontains "[") {Write-host "We found a bad char";$ThatOldName -replace "\[", "`["}
            Try { Rename-Item -literalPath $ThatOldName -NewName ($turd.NameToChange) -ErrorAction Stop }
            Catch [System.UnauthorizedAccessException]
            {
                Centeralize "You do not have permission to change this file's name" "Red"
            }
            Catch 
            { 
                $ErMsg = "Unable to change file's name "+$turd.name
                Centeralize $ErMsg "Red"
                $ErrMsg = $_.Exception.Message
                Centeralize $ErrMsg "Red"
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Write-Host "Maybe Another time..."
        }
    }

I can’t believe it worked! wooo results from this:

To this!:

I can’t do much about files that already exists, besides people mentioing way to over-write existing files which I’m not coding for, nope sorry.

but so far so good. This script is awesome!

Today I discovered that Try-Catch only works on terminating exceptions…

Powershell ErrorAction

Sigh… This means I have to do additional coding if I want the script to get all items from main folder, even if there’s a permission restriction on a child folder.

Life’s rough!

Posted on

WMIC Fun!

I’ve blogged about WMI before, more for setting up dedicated accounts for monitoring purposes.

Today we are going to have some fun with WMIC, the command line interface for simple and quick query data.

I got these ideas after reading this source blog… and I was curious at what level these worked (admin or not)

Using WMI

Most WMIC commands are issued in the following format:

wmic [Object Class] [Action] [Parameters]

For example, you can collect a list of groups or users on the local system and domain using the following commands:

wmic group list brief
wmic useraccount get name,sid

Yup, SIDs are no secret and you can pretty much query the whole domain if there’s been no hardening done. I haven’t tested this on a hardened domain but out of the box all users login name and SID are open for any standard user to query.

You can also perform the same data collection over the network without ever logging into the remote machine provided you know have some administrative credentials that the remote system will accept.

The same command issued against a remote system in another domain looks like this:

wmic /user:"FOREIGN_DOMAIN\Admin" /password:"Password" /node:192.168.33.25 group list brief

I can’t test this in my lab as I don’t have an alternative domain to play with (yet), but let’s see if I can query a member server using a standard domain account:

wmic /node:subca.zewwy.ca group list brief

nope well that’s good…

Processes
WMIC can collect a list of the currently running processes similar to what you’d see in “Task Manager” using the following command:

wmic process list
wmic process get name

Note that some of the WMIC built-ins can also be used in “brief” mode to display a less verbose output. The process built-in is one of these, so you could collect more refined output using the command:

wmic process list brief

Yup, those all work, even as standard user.

Some examples

Start an Application

wmic process call create "calc.exe"

Yeah… that worked…

I decided to see if I could somehow exploit these to get elevated rights, so far no dice.. but I did find this randomly while searching for a possible way…

sure enough, if you add start cmd.exe /k “net use” and name it net use.bat it will go into and endless loop. Mhmm interesting and easiest way to do a Denial Of Service attack.

anyway moving on…

System Information and Settings

You can collect a listing of the environment variables (including the PATH) with this command: (standard User works)

wmic environment list

OS/System Report HTML Formatted

wmic /output:c:os.html os get /format:hform

This was literally cause my standard account didn’t have access to C:\temp cause I created the folder using my admin account at some earlier point in time.

Products/Programs Installed Report HTML Formatted

wmic /output:c:product.html product get /format:hform

Turn on Remoted Desktop Remotely

Wmic /node:"servername" /user:"user@domain" /password: "password" RDToggle where ServerName="server name" call SetAllowTSConnections 1

Get Server Drive Space Usage Remotely (any node commands require elevated permissions, standard user fails at these generally)

WMIC /Node:%%A LogicalDisk Where DriveType="3" Get DeviceID,FileSystem,FreeSpace,Size /Format:csv MORE /E +2 >> SRVSPACE.CSV

Get PC Serial Number (works as standard user)

wmic bios get serialnumber

Get PC Product Number (works as standard user)

wmic baseboard get product

Find stuff that starts on boot (works as standard user)

wmic STARTUP GET Caption, Command, User

Reboot or Shutdown (works as standard user)

wmic os get buildnumber
wmic os where buildnumber="2600" call reboot

Get Startup List (works as standard user)

wmic startup list full

Information About Harddrives (works as standard user)

wmic logicaldisk where drivetype=3 get name, freespace, systemname, filesystem, size, volumeserialnumber

Information about OS (works as standard user)

wmic os get bootdevice, buildnumber, caption, freespaceinpagingfiles, installdate, name, systemdrive, windowsdirectory /format:htable > c:osinfo.htm

User and Groups

Local user and group information can be obtained using these commands:

wmic useraccount list
wmic group list
wmic sysaccount list

For domain controllers, this should provide a listing of all user accounts and groups in the domain. The “sysaccount” version provides you with system accounts built-in and otherwise,which is useful for any extra accounts that may have been added by rootkits.

Identify any local system accounts that are enabled (guest, etc.)

wmic USERACCOUNT WHERE "Disabled=0 AND LocalAccount=1" GET Name

Number of Logons Per USERID

wmic netlogin where (name like "%skodo") get numberoflogons

Get Domain Names And When Account PWD set to Expire

WMIC UserAccount GET name,PasswordExpires /Value

Patch Management

Need to know if there are any missing patches on the system? WMIC can help you find out with this command:

wmic qfe list

The QFE here stands for “Quick Fix Engineering”.
The results also include the dates of install should that be needed from an auditing standpoint.

Shares

Enumeration of all of the local shares can be collected using the command:

wmic share list

The result will also include hidden shares (named with a $ at the end).

Find user-created shares (usually not hidden)

wmic SHARE WHERE "NOT Name LIKE '%$'" GET Name, Path

so far all these are working as standard user, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Networking

Use the following command to extract a list of network adapters and IP address information:

wmic nicconfig list

Get Mac Address:

wmic nic get macaddress

Update static IP address:

wmic nicconfig get description, index
wmic nicconfig where index=9 call enablestatic("192.168.16.4"), ("255.255.255.0")

Yup got to be an admin for that one

Change network gateway:

wmic nicconfig where index=9 call setgateways("192.168.16.4", "192.168.16.5"),(1,2)

Enable DHCP:

wmic nicconfig where index=9 call enabledhcp

Get List of IP Interfaces

wmic nicconfig where IPEnabled='true'

Services

WMIC can list all of the installed services and their configurations using this command:

wmic service list

The output will include the full command used for starting the service and its verbose description.

Other examples

Service Management

 wmic service where caption="DHCP Client" call changestartmode "Disabled"

Look at services that are set to start automatically

wmic SERVICE WHERE StartMode="Auto" GET Name, State

Services Report on a Remote Machine HTML Formatted:

wmic /output:c:services.htm /node:server1 service list full / format:htable

Get Startmode of Services

Wmic service get caption, name, startmode, state

Change Start Mode of Service:

wmic service where (name like "Fax" OR name like "Alerter") CALL ChangeStartMode Disabled

Get Running Services Information

Wmic service where (state="running") get caption, name, startmode, state

Another interesting feature of WMIC is its ability to record the run-time command executed and runtime configuration all in one XML file. A recorded session might look something like this:

wmic /record:users_list.xml useraccount list

Of course, since WMIC wasn’t designed as a recording device, there are some caveats to using the XML. First, you can only use XML output, there are no other formats defined.

Event logs

Obtain a Certain Kind of Event from Eventlog

wmic ntevent where (message like "%logon%") list brief

Clear the Eventlog

wmic nteventlog where (description like "%secevent%") call cleareventlog

Retrieve list of warning and error events not from system or security logs

WMIC NTEVENT WHERE “EventType < 3 AND LogFile != ‘System’ AND LogFile != ‘Security’” GET LogFile, SourceName, EventType, Message, TimeGenerated /FORMAT:”htable.xsl”:” datatype = number”:” sortby = EventType” > c:appevent.htm

Thanks Andrea!

Posted on

Requesting, Signing, and Applying internal PKI certificates on VCSA 6.7

The Story

Everyone loves a good story. Well today it begins with something I wanted to do for a while but haven’t got around to. I remember adjusting the certificates on 5.5 vCenter and it caused a lot of grief. Now it may have been my ignorance it also may have been due to poor documentation and guides, who knows. Now with VMware now going full linux (Photon OS) for the vCenter deployments (much more light weight) it’s still nice to see a green icon in your web browser when you navigate the nice new HTML5 based management interface. Funny that the guide I followed, even after applying their own certificate still had a “not secure” notification in their browser.

This might be because he didn’t install his Root CA certs into the computers trusted CA store on the machine he was navigating the web interface from. However I’m still going to thank RAJESH RADHAKRISHNAN for his post in VMArena. it helped. I will cover some alternatives however.

Not often I do this but I’m lazy and don’t feel like paraphrasing…

VCSA Certificate Overview

Before starting the procedure just a quick intro for managing vSphere Certificates, vSphere Certificates can manage in two different modes

VMCA Default Certificates

VMCA provides all the certificates for vCenter Server and ESXi hosts on the Virtual Infrastructure and it can manage the certificate lifecycle for vCenter Server and ESXi hosts. Using VMCA default the certificates is the simplest method and less overhead.

VMCA Default Certificates with External SSL Certificates (Hybrid Mode)
This method will replace the Platform Services Controller and vCenter Server Appliance SSL certificates, and allow VMCA to manage certificates for solution users and ESXi hosts. Also for high-security conscious deployments, you can replace the ESXi host SSL certificates as well. This method is Simple, VMCA manages the internal certificates and by using the method, you get the benefit of using your corporate-approved SSL certificates and these certificates trusted by your browsers.

Here we are discussing about the Hybrid mode, this the VMware’s recommended deployment model for certificates as it procures a good level of security. In this model only the Machine SSL certificate signed by the CA and replaced on the vCenter server and the solution user and ESXi host certificates are distributed by the VMCA.

I guess before I did the whole thing, were today I’m just going to be changing the cert that handles the web interface, which is all I really care about in this case.

Requirements

  • Working PKI based on Active directory Certificate Server.
  • Certificate Server should have a valid Template for vSphere environment
    Note : He uses a custom template he creates. I simply use the Web Server template built in to ADCS.
  • vCenter Server Appliance with root Access

Requesting the Certificate

Now requesting the certificate requires shell access, I recommend to enable SSH for ease of copying data to and from the VCSA as well as commands.

To do this log into the physical Console of the VCSA, in my case it’s a VM so I opened up the console from the VCSA web interface. Press F2 to login.

Enable both SSH and BASH Shell

OK, now we can SSH into the host to make life easier (I used putty):

Run

 /usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager

and select the operation option 1

Specify the following options:

  • Output directory path: path where will be generated the private key and the request
  • Country : your country in two letters
  • Name : The FQDN of your vCSA
  • Organization : an organization name
  • OrgUnit : type the name of your unit
  • State : country name
  • Locality : your city
  • IPAddess : provide the vCSA IP address
  • Email : provide your E-mail address
  • Hostname : the FQDN of your vCSA
  • VMCA Name: the FQDN where is located your VMCA. Usually the vCSA FQDN

Once the private key and the request is generated select Option 2 to exit

Next we have to export the Request and key from the location.

There are several options on how to compete this. Option 1 is how our source did it…

Option 1 (WinSCP)

using WinSCP for this operation .

To perform export we need additional permission on VCSA , type the following command for same

chsh -s /bin/bash root

Once connected to vCSA from winscp tool navigate the path you have mentioned on the request and download the vmca_issued_csr.csr file.

Option 2 (cat)

Simple Cat the CSR file, and use the mouse to highlight the contents. Then paste it into ADCS Request textbox field.

Signing The Request

Now you simply Navigate to your signing certificate authorizes web interface. usually you hope that the PKI admin has secured this with TLS and is not just using http like our source, but instead uses HTTPS://FQDN/certsrv or just HTTPS://hostname/certsrv.

Now we want to request a certificate, an advanced certificated…

Now simply, submit and from the next page select the Base 64 encoded option and Download the Certificate and Certificate Chain.

Note :- You have to export the Chain certificate to .cer extension , by default it will be PKCS#7

Open Chain file by right click or double click navigate the certificate -> right click -> All Tasks -> export and save it as filename.cer

Now that we have our signed certificate and chains lets get to importing them back into the VCSA.

Importing the Certificates

Again there are two options here:

Option 1 (WinSCP)

using WinSCP for this operation .

To perform export we need additional permission on VCSA , type the following command for same

chsh -s /bin/bash root

Once connected to vCSA from winscp tool navigate the path you have mentioned on the request and upload the certnew.cer file. Along with any chain CA certs.

Option 2 (cat)

Simply open the CER file in notepad, and use the mouse to highlight the contents. Then paste it into any file on the VCSA over the putty session.

E.G

vim /tmp/certnew.cer

Press I for insert mode. Right click to paste. ESC to change modes, :wq to save.

Run

 /usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager

and select the operation option 1

Enter administrator credentials and enter option number 2

Add the exported certificate and generated key path from previous steps and Press Y to confirm the change

Custom certificate for machine SSL: Path to the chain of certificate (srv.cer here)
Valid custom key for machine SSL: Path to the .key file generated earlier.
Signing certificate of the machine SSL certificate: Path to the certificate of the Root CA (root.cer , generated base64 encoded certificate).

Piss what did I miss…

That doesn’t mean shit to me.. “PC Load letter, wtf does that mean!?”

Googling, the answer was rather clear! Thanks Digicert!

Since I have an intermediate CA, and I was trying either the Intermediate or the offline it would fail.. I needed them both in one file. So opened each .cer and pasted them into one file “signedca.cer”

Now this did take a while, mostly around 70% and 85% but then it did complete!

Checking out the web interface…

Look at that green lock, seeing even IP listed in the SAN.. mhm does that mean…

Awwww yeah!!! even navigating the VCSA by IP and it still secure! Woop!

Conclusion

Changing the certificate in vCenter 6.7 is much more flexable and easier using the hybird approach and I say thumbs up. 😀 Thanks VMware.

Ohhh yea! Make sure you update your inventory hosts in your backup software with the new certificate else you may get error attempting backup and restore operations, as I did with Veeam. It was super easy to fix just validate the host under the inventory area, by going through the wizard for host configuration.

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NTFS Permissions and the Oddities

NTFS Permissions

What is NTFS?

NTFS is a high-performance and self-healing file system proprietary to Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 desktop systems as well as commonly used on Windows Servers 2016, 2012, 2008, 2003, 2000 & NT Server. NTFS file system supports file-level security, transactions, encryption, compression, auditing and much more. It also supports large volumes and powerful storage solution such as RAID/LDM. The most important features of NTFS are data integrity (transaction journal), the ability to encrypt files and folders to protect your sensitive data as well as the greatest flexibility in data handling.

Cool, now that we got that out of the way, file systems require access controls, believe it or not that’s controlled using lists called Access Control Lists (ACLs). Huh, who would of thunk it, ACLs either Allow or Deny permissions to the files and folders in the file system.

So far nothing odd or crazy here… There can come times when a user may have multiple permissions on a resource from alternative sources E.G. (Explicit vs Inherited), now depending which will determine whether the action is allowed or dined based on precedence.

A little more intricate, but still nothing odd here. However good reference material. Up Next, another tid bit required to understand the oddtites I will discuss.

File Explorer (explorer.exe)

If you’re an in-depth sysadmin you may know that by default (Windows7+) you can not run file explorer (explorer.exe) as an admin, or elevated. References one and two. Now in the second one there is a work around but I have not tested this, though I will actually probably for my next blog post. But for now the main thing to no is that you can’t run explorer elevated by default.

Turns out this is due to Explorer.exe being single threaded.. apparently.

Source One (says it’s possible, with person reply… didn’t work, links to source 2)

Source Two (Follow up initial question as to why it didn’t work, links to source 3)

Source Three (Old MS doc from unknown author with slight misconception based on my findings below.

“When running as a administrator with UAC enabled, your standard user token does not have write permissions to these protected folders.” –Correct

“Unfortunately, because Windows Explorer was not designed to run in multiple security contexts in the same desktop session, Windows cannot simply throw up a UAC prompt and then launch an elevated instance of Explorer.” –Correct

“Instead, you get one or more elevation prompts (if full-prompting is enabled) and Windows completes the operations using the full administrator token. This can be annoying if you have to make repeated operations in these folders.” –Slightly bad wording, it SHOULD simply utilize UAC prompt creds to complete the requested action (create folder, or navigate folder), but as shown below it will actually adjust the ACL’s themselves to let the action requested complete under the security context of the current running user.

Next! See all Examples of my claim as indicated in this blog post.

User Access Control (UAC)

So again talking WIndows 7 onward here Microsoft made NTFS more secure by having the OS utilize User Access Controls, for when elevated rights were required. For we all do best practices and use different admin and standard accounts, right? To keep it short the lil pop up asking “Are you sure you want to run this?” if you have the ability to run elevated or a Credential Pop-up dialog if you do not.

You can view the “Tasks that trigger a UAC prompt” section of the wiki to get an idea when. (Pretty much anytime you require an system level event)

However I’m going to bring attention this specific one:

Viewing or changing another user’s folders and files

Oddity #1

This brings up our first oddity. If I were to ask you the following question:

You are logged on as an admin on a workstation, you open file explorer, you navigate to a folder in which you do not have either explicit or inherited permissions. When you double click this folder you are presented with a UAC prompt, what does clicking “Continue” do?

A) Clicking Continue causes UAC to temperately runs explorer elevated and navigates into the folder.

B) Clicking Continue will take the current logged on user Security Identifier (SID) and append it to the folders ACL.

Now if you are following along closely we already discussed that A) isn’t even a viable option which means the answer is non other then B…

 

Yup, marvel at it… dirty ACLs everywhere. Now do note I had to break inheritance from the parent folder in order to restrict normal access, which makes sense when your navigating folders in file explorer as an admin already. But this information is still good to know if you do come across this when you are working in an elevated user session.

Also note IF the folder’s owner is SYSTEM or TrustedInstaller, clicking continue will not work and you’ll get an error, cause this action will not take ownership of a folder only grant access, and without the rights to grant those permissions it will still fail, even though there’s nothing stopping you from using takeown or the file explorer to actually grant your account ownership.

Oddity #2

This is the one I really wanted to cover in this blog post. You may have noticed that I stated I broke inheritance, this is generally not best practice and should be done as a last resort usually when it comes to permission management. However it does come around as a solution to access control when it really needs to be super granular.

I had created a TechNet post asking how to restore Volume ACLs, to which no good answers came about. So what I ended up doing was simply adding a new disk to a VM and checked out it’s permissions.

Now if you look closely you’ll notice 3 lines specifying specific access rights for the group “Users”. Now on a workstation, these permissions make perfect sense, a user has the right to read and execute files (needed just to use the system), create folders and they are the owners of them (what good is a workstation if you can’t organize your work), create files and write data (what goods a workstation if you can’t save your work).

However you might think, bah this will be a server (I’ll harden it that standard users can’t have interactive log on) so along with traversal bypass granted by default users should have access to only the specific folders in which they are explicitly granted, and by default will not have any access right inherited.

Removing Users still leaves the Administrators group with full Control rights, and you are a member of that group by domain inheritance, so all is good right? Sounds gravy until…. you realize as soon as you removed the “Users” accounts from the ACLs your admin account has inherited access rights revoked?

Inside the disk was a folder “Test” as you can see by its inherited ACLs

Now this is where it gets weird, it would be safe to assume that my domain admin account which I’m logged in as is part of the Built in administrators group… as demonstrated by this drawing here:

Which is also proven by the fact I can run CMD and other applications elevated via the UAC prompt and I simply click Yes instead of getting a credential box.

Now wouldn’t it be safe to assume that since Administrators have Full Control on the folder in question clearly shows that above, we should be able to traverse the folder, right? It’s basic operation of someone with “Full Control”… and…. awwwww would you look at that? Just look at it! Look at it!

It’s a big ol’ UAC prompt, now why would we get that if we have inherited permission… we already know what it’s going to do… that’s grant my account’s SID permissions, but why? I have inherited full control through administrators don’t I? and sure enough, clicking Continue…

well that’s super weird. I’m skip paste a lot of my trial and error tasks and make the claim, it literally comes down to one ACL that magically makes inheritance work like it’s suppose to…

believe it or not that’s it…. that’s the magical ACL on a folder that will make File Explorer actually adhere to inherited permissions. literally… granting S-1-5-32-545 Users “List folder \ Read Data” permission on the folder, and now as an admin I can traverse the folder without a UAC prompt, and without explicit permissions…

Oddity #3

So I’m like, alright, I’m liking this, I’m learning new things, things are getting weird…. and I can like weird, so I decided like YO! let’s create some folders and like see how things play out when I dickery do with those nasty little ACLs you know what I mean?

 

This stuffs too clean, you know what I mean, all nicely inherited, user owner, nah let’s change things up on this one, SYSTEM you got ownership, and you know what… all regular users.. yer gone you know what that means… inheritance who needs that. This is security, deeerrrrr…..

Awww yeah, and sure enough, trying to traverse the folder gives a UAC prompt, and grants my account explicit permissions, there goes those clean ACLs.

Answer to the Whole Thing

Turns out I was thinking about this all day at work, I couldn’t get it. It honest felt like somehow all access rights were being granted by the “Users” group only…. as if… they are.. using the lowest common denominator… like it can’t… run elevated! DOH!

The answer has been staring me in the face the whole freaking time!

I already stated “If you’re an in-depth sysadmin you may know that by default (Windows7+) you can not run file explorer (explorer.exe) as an admin, or elevated.”

I’m expecting to do task via explorer through an account I have inheritance from BUT the group I’m expecting to grant me the right is an elevated rights group “Administrators”… like DOH!

So the easy fix is create any random security group in the domain, add users accordingly into that group and grant that group full control over the folder, sub-folders and files (even make the group the owner of said folders and subfolders). Then sure enough everything works as expected.

For Example

added my admin account into this group. Then on the file server. Leave the D:\ disk permissions in place. Create a Folder in which other folders can be created and shared accordingly, in this case, teehee let’s call it DATA.

Sure enough, no surprise it looks like this…

everything as it should be, I created the Folder, my accounts the owner, I have inherited Full Control because I am the owner, and all other permissions have been granted by the base disk, besides the one permission which was configured at the disk level to be “this folder only” so all is good.

And now I did some quick searching on how to restrict access without breaking inheritance, and overall most responses was “even though it’s best practice to not break inheritance, alternative means for access control via deny’s is even more dirty”.

So, here we go lets break the inheritance from the disk and remove all users access, now as we discovered we will initially get UAC prompts if we try to navigate it with our admin account after this. Let’s not do that just yet after. So it’s now like this (we granted the group above ownership).

Now since I am a member of this group (I just added my account so I’m going to log off and back on to ensure my group mappings update properly for my kerberos tickets (TGT baby) to work.

whoami /groups

I’m so glad I did this, cause my MMC snap-in did not save the changes and I was not in this group after my first re-logon and sure enough after I fixed it.. 🙂

Now if I navigate the folder I should not get a UAC prompt cause my request to traverse the folder will be granted via File Share Admins, which is not an elevated SID request and I’ll be able to create files and folders without interruptions… lets try..

And there it is, no UAC prompt, all creation options available, and no users in the folders ACLs! Future Admins will need to be added to this group however, if an admin (domain admin or otherwise) attempts to login and navigate this folder they will get a UAC prompt and their SIDs will be auto appended to all folders, subfolders and files! Let me show you…

Welcome DeadUserAdmin! He’s been granted domain admin rights only, and decided to check out the file server…

as shown in the diagram the group permissions, and those inherited by simply being a domain admin, such as local admin. Below the permissions of a file before this domain admin attempts to navigate the folders..

Now as we learnt when this admin double clicks the DATA folder explorer can’t run elevated, and can’t grant traverse access via this accounts nested permissions under the administrators account, and when the UAC prompt appears is granting that SID direct access… lets follow:

There it is! and sure enough…

Yup every folder, and every file now has this SID in it, and when the user no longer works at the company…

SIDE ERROR****

deleting the Users Profile (to fix, naviagte in a couple folders, cut a folder, go to user profile root folder and paste to shorten the overall path name)

So anyway after the user leaves the company and his account gets deleted…

Yay, a whole entire folder/file structure with SIDs as Principals cause AD can’t resolve them anymore. They have been deleted. So how does an admin now fix DeadUserAdmins undesired effects?

Navigate to the root DATA folder properties, Security Tab, advanced settings. Remove the SID…

Be careful of the checkbox at the bottom (Replace all child permissions) use this with caution as it can do some damages if other folders down the line have broken inheritance and specific permissions. In this case all folders and files inherent from this base DATA drive and thus….

All get removed. If there are other folders with broken inheritance then an Audit is required of all folders, their resources, their purposes, and who’s suppose to have access.

Another option is to nest domain admins into file share admins, then it all works well too.

I hope this blog post has helped someone.

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Email Scamming

The Story

Everyone loves a good story, ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyway sitting around playing a new puzzle game I picked up The Talos Principle. Enjoying it very much, and I my phone goes off, just another email. Looking at the Subject did have me intrigued (while also instantly alerting me that its a scam). Now I plan to cover this blog post in 2 parts. 1 in which I cover the basics of catching “Red Flags” and how to spot these types of emails for the basic user, and 2 more technically in-depth for those that happen to be admins of some kind. Let’s begin.

The Email in Question

Now looking right at this it may not scream out at you, but I’ll point them all out.

First Red Flag

First off, the Subject, the first thing anyone sees when they get an email, and in this case it’s designated to grab attention. “Order of a Premium Account”? What I didn’t order any premium account. So the inclination is to open the email to find out more. Most of the time this is a safe move to make, but I’m sure hackers could make it in at this point if it was an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) and they really wanted to target you. In this case, not likely. This in itself isn’t a red flag as many legit emails can be of high importance and the sender could use alerting terms to ensure action is taken when time is of the essence. However it still a tactic used by the perpetrator.

Second Red Flag

So what’s the body tell us? In this case it is a clear and definitive “Red Flag”; Vague, and requesting the user to open an attachment for more details. This is the hugest red flag, the body should contain enough information to satisfy the recipient to understand exactly what an attachment would justify being there for.

Third Red Flag

Now mixing the two together we get another “Red Flag” the subject was for a premium account for a “Diamond Shop App.” whatever that is, I suppose many apps have separate account creations and thus this isn’t exactly alarming, however, if it was from the Apple store the email I’m assuming would either follow Apples template (which this doesn’t), considering the attachment is labeled “Apple Invoice.doc”. I also don’t use the Apple Store so for me was an easy red flag.

Fourth Red Flag

Grammar; “Are you sure to cancel this order, please see attachment for more details. thanks you” a question ending in a period with a following “thanks you” with an s and no cap, and the subject was for an account creation…. need I say more?

What now?

OK, so pretty obvious here there some shenanigans goin’ on here. If you’re an end user this is a good time to send the email (as an attachment) to your IT department. It is important to send the email itself as an attachment to retain the email headers (discussed later in this post) for admins to analyze the original sender details.

Technical Stuff

Now we’re going to get technical, so if you are not a technical person you education session is done, else keep reading.

Initial Analyses

Yeah you guessed it; VirusTotal.

Well, nyet….

Nothing… OK, let’s analyze the headers quick with MxToolbox…

Here we can see it was sent from the domain “retail-payment.com”, they also masked their list of targets by BCCing them all, shady, and pointing to main to address to noreply@apple.com or device@apple.com which probably are non existent addresses for apple, and making it look more legit while not letting apple actually know. What about this sending domain?

sad another zero day domain registration, I was expecting GoDaddy to be honest, was rather disappointed to see Wix supporting such rubbish.

What’s next? Joe Sandbox!

At this point it’s clear the file and email are brand new attempts and not caught by virus total, so what is it attempting to accomplish. I signed up to JoeSandbox to find out. Then submitted the file, I was impressed with the results!

Results…

I’m not sure why older OS with older Office was clean? but newer showed some results, when I opened the report I was like HA!

Neat looks like it the doc had links to some websites, and yeah.. the sandbox went there! 😀

Would ya look at that! It looks like the apple login page, thankfully the URL doesn’t match apple’s at all and should be another duh red flag.

OK, who registered that domain?

I have no clue who that registrar is, nor do I know how they managed to keep it alive since the 2000’s hosting malicious phishing sites? Sad…

Conclusion

Don’t open up stupid emails, and report them to your admins whenever possible. 😀

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Using OpenSSL to convert PKCS12 to PEM

Found from here

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.crt.pem -clcerts -nokeys
openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.key.pem -nocerts -nodes

After that you have:

  • certificate in newfile.crt.pem
  • private key in newfile.key.pem

To put the certificate and key in the same file use the following

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.pem

If you need to input the PKCS#12 password directly from the command line (e.g. a script), just add -passin pass:${PASSWORD}:

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.crt.pem -clcerts -nokeys -passin 'pass:P@s5w0rD'

Thanks KMX

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WordPress: Error Establishing a Connection to the Database

This will be a short one, as I didn’t take screen shots, and I didn’t have to do much to resolve it. Just wanted to make note of it.

The other day I wanted to check my own site and instead of loading I got the message “Error Establishing a Connection to the Database”.

I applied my usual fix first; reboot. While the VM was rebooting it appeared there had been some disk corruption? the automatic fsck failed stating a manual fsck was required.

so…

fsck /dev/sda1

and a bunch of “errors” and fix?<y>

after a bunch of answering yes, it stated the disk was repaired successfully.

after this I typed “exit” or “return”, and the system rebooted like normal. Lucky for me the WordPress site came up clean after that. However even had this had failed, we all have backups right?

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Exchange: Something Went Wrong

Fixing Exchange

Now, I’ve taken a couple Exchange courses. They cover all the bases… expect when things go wrong. That’s why it’s nice to have labs… today in my Lab I discovered I was unable to get email from my exchange server, neither from activeSync nor Outlook Web App (OWA).

Something went wrong alright… first thing I noticed was my disk had run out of space… whoops. Hahaha. Expand the drive, reboot and… Something Went Wrong…

Sigh…. alright event viewer… what ya got for me…

Unable to mount…. I guess it didn’t like what happened to the DB after the disk ran out of space… some quick googling (1 and 2 copy cats… and can’t even tell you the DB file locations…) and one more, more personal blog post.

Exchange Default DB File Locations

If you are using Exchange Server 2000 & 2003, you can locate your EDB files at:

C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\Priv1.edb
C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\Pub1.edb

If you are using Exchange Server 2007, you can locate your EDB files at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group\Mailbox Database.edb
C:\Program\Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox\First Storage Group\Public Folder Database.edb

If you are using Exchange Server 2010, you can locate your EDB files at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Mailbox Database\Mailbox Database.edb
C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Public Folder Database\Public Folder Database.edb

If you are using Exchange Server 2013, you can locate your EDB files at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Mailbox\Mailbox database Name\Mailbox database Name.edb

If you are using Exchange Server 2016, you can locate your EDB files at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Mailbox\Mailbox Database Name.edb

Repairing the Exchange Mailbox Database

Which they all tell you to use a cool old “tool” eseutil. which seemed straight forward, ensure you run an elevated cmd or you won’t have access to the directory path of the exchange DB file. In my case I used the Exchange 2013 path which was the version used in my lab.

I also moved the log files:

move *.log c:\temp

Yeah… that took a lil while.

Mounting the Exchange Mailbox Database

Once it’s repaired used Exchange Mgmt Shell to mount it:

Whoops, silly me, since everyone said to stop the information store service I did… so after starting the service, and rerunning the command it succeeded.

Which resulted in:

Much better!

Summary

  1. Check the source of the Database Corruption. (Mine was Disk Space)
  2. Stop the Information Store Service
  3. Check the Validity of the Mailbox Database (eseutil /mh)
  4. Repair if required (eseutil /p)
  5. Restart the Exchange Information Store Service
  6. Mount the Mailbox Database

Hope this helps someone.

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