See the announcement on the Microsoft Security Blog.
About • Labs • Purpose • Structure • Contributing • Trademarks
SimuLand is an open-source initiative by Microsoft to help security researchers around the world deploy lab environments that reproduce well-known techniques used in real attack scenarios, actively test and verify effectiveness of related Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender and Azure Sentinel detections, and extend threat research using telemetry and forensic artifacts generated after each simulation exercise.
These lab environments will provide use cases from a variety of data sources including telemetry from Microsoft 365 Defender security products, Azure Defender and other integrated data sources through Azure Sentinel data connectors.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Golden SAML AD FS Mail Access | Simulate an adversary stealing the AD FS token signing certificate, from an “on-prem” AD FS server, in order to sign SAML token, impersonate a privileged user and eventually collect mail data in a tenant via the Microsoft Graph API. |
As we build out the SimuLand framework and start populating lab environments, we will be working under the following basic principles:
- Understand the underlying behavior and functionality of adversary tradecraft
- Identify mitigations and attacker paths by documenting preconditions for each attacker action
- Expedite the design and deployment of threat research lab environments
- Stay up-to-date with latest techniques and tools used by real threat actors
- Identify, document, and share relevant data sources to model and detect adversary actions
- Validate and tune detection capabilities
The structure of the project is very simple and is broken down in a modular way so that we could re-use and test a few combinations of attacker actions with different lab environment designs. In addition, step by step lab guides are provided to aggregate all the required documentation to not only execute the end-to-end simulation exercise, but also prepare and deploy the lab environment.
| Folder | Description |
|---|---|
| Prepare | Documents to prepare before deploying a lab environment. Almost every environment contributed through this initiative requires at least a Microsoft 365 E5 license (paid or trial) and an Azure tenant. Other deployment requirements are specified in the lab guides. |
| Deploy | Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates and documents to deploy lab environments. Depending on the lab guide being worked on, the design of the network environments might change a little. While some labs would replicate a hybrid cross-domain environment (on-prem -> Cloud), others would focus only on resources in the cloud. Additionally, ARM templates are provided to expedite the deployment process and help document the infrastructure as code. |
| Simulate Detect |
Documents to execute attacker actions mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. The goal of the Simulate and Detect component is to also summarize the main steps used by a threat actor to accomplish a specific objective and allow security researchers to get familiarized with the attacker behavior at a high level. Finally, from a defensive perspective, simulation steps will be mapped to detection queries and alerts from Microsoft Defender security products and Azure Sentinel. We believe this would help guide some of the extended threat research generated from the simulation exercise. |
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.
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