Achieving objectives by automating Microsoft Office

In this section, we will look into ideas and techniques for how COM automation can be used during red teaming. In particular, the focus will be on Office applications. For simplicity and consistency, the examples in this section have been written using PowerShell. However, remember that this can be done with any language that supports COM objects.

First, let's look at Outlook and how we can send emails via the Outlook COM object during post-exploitation.

Automating sending emails via Outlook

A simple yet powerful technique to send emails without having to set up or configure a mail client is to just leverage the mail client on the host of a compromised user.

Let's say we were able to pivot on a machine and found an interesting file that we want to exfiltrate. Here is a neat PowerShell script that leverages COM automation. As I described earlier, this can be achieved with any scripting language that can leverage...