Caldera Installation and Simulating an Attack with Caldera

*Image Source: https://github.com/mitre/caldera*

Caldera is an automation and response platform designed for security professionals. It is used to enhance cybersecurity operations and threat hunting processes. Caldera is designed to simulate attack scenarios, monitor threats, analyze them, and respond. This allows security teams to test defense strategies, identify vulnerabilities, and be prepared for real-world attacks.

Key features of Caldera include the automated execution of attack scenarios, integration of threat intelligence, security analysis, and automation of incident response processes. With this tool, security experts can create and execute realistic scenarios to test and improve defense mechanisms.

Caldera is also a project developed by MITRE and is designed to assist security professionals with threat hunting and incident response.

Lets install Caldera!!!

Requirements
->Caldera
->Pythons
->Git(optionally)
->Linux or MacOS Host

We can download the source files in two different ways.

Github;

git clone https://github.com/mitre/caldera.git --recursive

Github Gui;

Then let’s run the following command to install the requirements
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Let’s run the application
python3 server.py –insecure

Then, let’s go to the browser and type this address;
Address: http:127.0.0.1:8888
Username: red
Password: admin

Now, let’s deploy agents for our attack tests.
Campaigns > Agents > Deploy an Agents
As a start, we can deploy the sandcat agent.

After choosing the OS type of the endpoint where we will deploy the Agent, we define the callback IP as Caldera’s IP and define the Agent name.

After coming down a little with the mouse, we see that the agent setup script has been prepared for us according to the information we have written.

I prepared this script for windows host. Let’s go and run the script on windows and deploy our agent.

Now we go and look at the Caldera interface and we’ll see the agent appear.

Now we can start a simple attack simulation.

Campaigns > Operations > Create Operation
Here I start a simple simulation with the techniques of Mitre’s Discovery tactic.

We can click “View Output” to see the outputs of any attack made. Here I looked at the output of the attack, which lists the processes on the endpoint.