CrackMapExec VS proxychains

Let’s walk through a typical attack against the Administrator account using a popular tool, CrackMapExec.

Attackers like to use crackmapexec to exploit Windows networks and machines. It can achieve various goals like enumerating users, cracking SMB shares, and injecting shellcode into memory.

After gaining a local administrator NTLM password hash using SMB relay attacks, Redbot Security used the “CrackMapExec” tool to pass the local administrator hash to all systems and found multiple systems using the same password:

ntlmrelayx2proxychains aims to connect the tool of the SecureAuthCorps' impacket suite, ntlmrelayx.py (hereafter referred to as "ntlmrelayx"), along with @byt3bl33d3r's tool, CrackMapExec (hereafter referred to as "CME"), over proxychains, developped by haad.

CrackMapExec - Swiss army knife for pentesting networks.

Regarding network shares, I personally tend to use crackmapexec with a list of systems. It won't list the ACLs but it is very good at finding out what a standard domain user could access (if this is what you are after) https://github.com/byt3bl33d3r/CrackMapExec

Fun fact: proxychains uses LD_PRELOAD [0] to hook the necessary syscalls [1] for setting up a "proxy environment" for the wrapped program, e.g. `connect`, `gethostbyname`, `gethostbyaddr`, etc. Note this also implies that it could be leaky in some cases when applied to a program that uses alternative syscalls to make an external connection.

[0] https://github.com/haad/proxychains/blob/master/src/proxycha...

[1] https://github.com/haad/proxychains/blob/master/src/libproxy...

You can use ProxyChains in order to use the SOCKS5 proxy with any application, depending on the OS you are using.

I assume that https://github.com/haad/proxychains is the project in question. At https://github.com/haad/proxychains/blob/master/src/proxychains.conf you can view the contents of the configuration file and then save it in /etc/proxychains.conf.

That is weird. However, missing configs are usually an easy problem to solve - simply find one online and copy it (once you understand it). Here is the one from the proxy chains repo. Lastly, be careful with Kali, it's definitely not suited to beginners (you're doing the right thing running it in a VM at least).

ntlmrelayx2proxychains aims to connect the tool of the SecureAuthCorps' impacket suite, ntlmrelayx.py (hereafter referred to as "ntlmrelayx"), along with @byt3bl33d3r's tool, CrackMapExec (hereafter referred to as "CME"), over proxychains, developped by haad.

You can go even further with tools like proxychains that let you chain multiple proxies. This is used while setting up tor and comes pre-installed with pentesting distros like Kali and ParrotOS.