Adversary Tactics: Red Team Operations - SO-CON 2025 (In-person & Virtual; US Time)

Upgrade your Red Team engagements with bleeding-edge Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) used by attackers in real-world breaches. This course will teach participants how to infiltrate networks, gather intelligence, and covertly persist in a network like an advanced adversary. Participants will use the skillsets taught in Adversary Tactics: Red Team Ops to go up against live incident responders in an enterprise lab environment designed to mimic a mature real-world network. Participants will learn to adapt and overcome Blue Team response through collaborative feedback as the course progresses.

Topics covered include:

• Design and deploy sophisticated, resilient covert attack infrastructure
• Utilize advanced Active Directory attack techniques to execute domain enumeration, escalation, and persistence
• Perform sophisticated post-exploitation actions, including sophisticated data mining, going beyond just achieving “Domain Admin”
• Use cutting-edge lateral movement methods to move through the enterprise
• Practice “offense-in-depth” by utilizing a variety of tools and techniques in response to defender actions and technical defenses
• Effectively train network defenders to better protect themselves against advanced, persistent adversaries

Course Summary

As organizations work to keep from becoming the next breach headline, they increasingly look to exercise their defenses through simulation of the sophisticated attackers they face. Organizations that have adopted an “assume breach” mentality understand it's a matter of when - not if - they will be compromised by these adversaries. The best way to test enterprise security operations against advanced threat actors is through application of the adversary mindset - commonly known as red teaming - through exercises that leverage the same tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) as real adversaries. If you’re looking to learn the tradecraft of adversary simulation operations in enterprise environments, sharpen your offensive technical skillset, and understand how to detect modern offensive tradecraft, this is the course for you.

This intense course immerses participants in a single simulated enterprise environment, with multiple domains, up-to-date and patched operating systems, modern defenses, and active network defenders responding to malicious activities. In keeping with the assumed breach mentality, the course provides detailed attacker tradecraft post initial access, which includes; performing host situational awareness and "safety checks", establishing resilient command and control (C2) infrastructure, escalation privileges locally, breaking out of the beachhead, performing advanced lateral movement, escalating in Active Directory, performing advanced Kerberos attacks, and achieving red team objectives via data mining and exfiltration.

The course focuses on “offense-in-depth”, the ability to rapidly adapt to defensive mitigations and responses with a variety of offensive tactics and techniques. To drive this concept home, participants will go up against live incident responders that actively hunt for and block malicious activity in the environment. The responders will provide real-time feedback and a daily summary to participants to demonstrate what artifacts attacks can leave behind, and how participants can adapt their tradecraft to minimize their footprint.

Learn to use some of the most well-known offensive tools from the authors themselves, including co-creators and developers of Mythic, PowerView, PowerShell Empire, Unmanaged Powershell, Covenant, Merlin, Rubeus, GhostPack, and BloodHound!

Course Syllabus

Day 1:

• Introduction & Course Overview
• Red Team Operations Overview
• Attack Infrastructure
• Lab Introduction
• Host Situational Awareness
• C#/PowerShell Weaponization
• Local Privilege Escalation

Day 2:

• Defensive Debrief of Day 1 Participant Tradecraft
• An Introduction to Adversary Detection
• Credential Abuse
• Active Directory Situation Awareness
• Payload Methodology
• Lateral Movement
• SQL Abuse

Day 3:

• Defensive Debrief of Day 2 Participant Tradecraft
• OPSEC Considerations
• Active Directory Domain Trusts
• Kerberos Overview
• Kerberos Attacks (Gold and Silver tickets, and Forged Ticket Detection)

Day 4:

• Defensive Debrief of Day 3 Participant Tradecraft
• Bloodhound - Visualizing Attack Paths
• Data Protection API (DPAPI)
• Advanced Kerberos Attacks
• Complete Lab Debrief
• Final Defensive Debrief and Evaluation of Participant Tradecraft

SO-CON Training Benefits

This course is a part of the SO-CON 2025 event. Attend the SO-CON 2025 conference for FREE by adding the SO-CON 2025 ticket to your training order!

Stay tuned for announcements about more SO-CON training benefits!

Participant Requirements

This is an advanced course that will include a large amount of time in a simulated complex enterprise with active defensive personnel. Participants should have previous penetration testing training and/or experience with penetration testing tools and techniques. Additionally, experience with at least one Command and Control (C2) frameworks is highly preferred (e.g., Apfell\Mythic, Covenant, Cobalt Strike, Metasploit, etc). Lastly, the course covers various aspects of Windows, Active Directory, and C#\PowerShell, so some familiarity with these technologies will be beneficial.

Hybrid (Virtual) Attendance

If traveling to Arlington, VA isn't feasible, you can opt to take this course virtually online through Zoom. You will receive the same training portal access and watch the live instruction. However, the virtual training is not part of SO-CON - remote attendees will NOT receive any of the exclusive benefits that come with in-person training, including a free ticket to the SO-CON summit.
Remote attendees will receive logistics emails and credentials the week before the trainings.

FAQs

How can I contact the organizer with any questions?

Please email training@specterops.io with any questions.  

What's the refund policy?

Full refunds will be provided up to 7 days before the course start date.

What are the hardware requirements for attending the course?

Courses are based in the SpecterOps training portal and accessible via an internet connection; no VMs are required for labs. The following are recommended hardware requirements:

• Internet Connection
• 8GBs of RAM
• Modern Web Browser capable of rendering HTML5