Christopher Panayi

Christopher is the Chief Research Officer at MWR CyberSec (https://mwrcybersec.com), having previously led cyber-defense, red team, and targeted attack simulation (TAS) engagements for several years, as well as having designed and help run the in-house training programme for security consultants at MWR. As part of this work, a major focus area for him had been understanding attack techniques impacting Active Directory (AD); this led to publications such as: a discussion of practical ways to perform pass-the-hash attacks (https://labs.f-secure.com/blog/pth-attacks-against-ntlm-authenticated-web-applications/) and a discussion of the previous gold standard in AD security, the red forest, and why it did not meet its goal of making environments more secure in many cases (https://www.f-secure.com/content/dam/press/ja/media-library/reports/F-Secure%20Whitepaper%20-%20Tending%20To%20the%20Red%20Forest%20(English).pdf). His interest in how things work at a deep technical level - and desire to develop an understanding of how to use this information to compromise and secure systems and environments - has led him to his current focus, investigating and understanding Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, how it interacts with AD, and how to abuse its configuration to attack enterprise environments.

Presentations: