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Welcome to Mark Baggett - In Depth Defense

I am the course Author of SANS SEC573 Automating Information Security with Python. Check back frequently for updated tools and articles related to course material.




Metasploit Visual Basic Payloads in action

John Strand turned me on to this at CDI in December. We were talking about my presentation on the effectiveness of antivirus in detecting metasploit payloads and he asked if I had done any testing on the visual basic payloads. At the time I had not, but now I have to agree with John's assersion that this is potentially a very scary and powerful feature. Metasploit payloads can easily be embedded in Microsoft Office Documents and, as you might expect if you've read my previous blogs, antivirus software does not detect the payloads. I made a video to demonstrate the creation and use of the payloads.

To mitigate these attacks you can use Group policy to set your Office Document Macro Security to HIGH. You could use the Medium setting if you work for that mythical company where users don't ignore security warnings. Here are some helpful links

Setting Macro Levels
Office Group Policy Templates

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