By now, you've likely heard about the Shadow Brokers and their alleged NSA tool dump. Regardless of whether you believe it was or was not the toolset of a nation-state actor, at least one thing is true: this stuff works, and it works well.

In this blog series I'll walk through some of what I've learned from the dump, focusing specifically on two tools: Eternal Blue , a tool for backdooring Windows via MS17-010, and DoublePulsar , an exploit that allows you to inject DLLs through the established backdoor, or inject your own shellcode payload. In this first post, we'll walk through setting up the environment and getting the front-end framework, Fuzzbunch, to run.

tl;dr - sweet nation-state level hax, remote unauthenticated attacks that pop shells as NT AUTHORITY\System. Remember MS08-067? Yeah, like that.

Setting up the environment

To get going, fire up a Windows 7 host in a virtual machine. Dont worry about the specs; all of my research and testing has been done in a Virtualbox VM with 1GB ram, 1 CPU core, and a 25GB hard drive. First and foremost, git clone (or download the zip) of the Shadowbrokers Dump. You should be able to grab it from x0rz' github. The exploits run through a framework not entirely unlike Metasploit. The framework itself runs in Python, so we need to grab a copy of Python 2.6 for Windows. If you catch yourself wondering why you're installing a 9 year old copy of Python, remember that the dump is from 2013, and the tools had been in use for a while. Fire up the DeLorean because we're about to go way back. Add Python to your environmental path by going to Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Environmental Variables and add C:\Python26 to the PATH field. Because you're running Python on Windows, there are a bunch of dependencies you'll need to install. The easiest way to overcome this is to install the Python for Windows Extensions, also known as PyWin. Grab a copy of PyWin 2.6 here. PyWin will very likely fail on its final step. No problem: open an administrator command prompt, cd C:\python26\scripts and run python pywin32_postinstall.py --install . Python and its dependencies should now be installed. We're now ready to launch the Fuzzbunch Framework. Navigate to the folder you downloaded the exploits, and cd windows . You'll need to create a folder called listeningposts or the next step will fail; so, mkdir listeningposts . You should now be able to launch Fuzzbunch - use python fb.py to kick it off.

Thats about it to get the software running. You'll be asked a few questions, such as your Target IP, Callback IP (your local IP address), and whether you want to use Redirection. For now, choose no. Fuzzbunch will ask for a Logs directory - this is a pretty cool feature that stores your attack history and lets you resume from where you left off. Create a Logs directory somewhere.