A penetration testing and consulting firm plans to release a free penetration testing toolkit next month at Black Hat Asia; the toolkit includes privilege escalation and network attack functions.

Paula Januszkiewicz, CEO of CQURE, says she and her team at the security firm are rolling 39 of the company's 200 homegrown hacking tools — plus five new ones — into the freebie CQTools kit that they will demonstrate and offer during their talk at the conference in Singapore.

"This toolkit allows a cybersecurity specialist to deliver complete tests within the infrastructure, starting with sniffing and spoofing activities, going through information extraction, password extraction, and custom payload generation," Januszkiewicz says.

Januszkiewicz's firm traditionally has developed its own penetration testing tools for its client engagements as well as its own research work. She says existing forensic investigation tools rarely come with all of the features her team requires and that provide researchers the ability to gather specific types of information. CQURE researchers built, for example, their own hacking tool for the cryptographic Data Protection Application Programming Interface (DPAPI) in Windows.

Her team reverse-engineered DPAPI and its later version, DPAPI-NG. "That is why we had to write our toolkit, which consists of over 40 tools decrypting almost everything in the operating system," she said. The researchers discovered how to decrypt DPAPI user-protected data by using the private key stored on a domain controller.

"DPAPI-NG is a very fresh subject and we already have the whole toolkit for it," Januszkiewicz notes.

Januszkiewicz says CQTools encompasses both exploit kits and information-extraction functions, which a researcher could use to grab information from different areas in an operating system, for example, and it can bypass anti-malware software during pen testing engagements and research.

CQURE performs consulting, pen testing, incident response services, training, and security research

Januszkiewicz, along with Mike Jankowski-Lorek, CQURE's cybersecurity specialist and cybersecurity and database architect, will demonstrate CQTools in their talk at Black Hat Asia. "I will be presenting different ways of revealing secrets from the operating system," she says. "I will show how data and secret storage and encryption work on Windows, and how we are able to compromise related operating system mechanisms."

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