Local firewall manipulation to facilitate RDP lateral movement

Local firewall manipulation to facilitate RDP lateral movement:

The commands listed under this category appear to be using the netsh command-line utility, which is used to configure network settings, including the Windows Firewall.¹ Specifically, they seem to be adding firewall rules to allow inbound connections on specific ports and potentially enabling the Remote Desktop service.

While the full commands are partially obscured, the structure suggests commands similar to the following:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="[Rule Name]" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=[Port Number]
netsh advfirewall firewall set service RemoteDesktop enable

You can see variations of these commands with different rule names and potentially different port numbers. The presence of keywords like "Terminal Server" and "RDP" further suggests the intent is to enable or modify firewall rules related to Remote Desktop Protocol.

Registry modification to facilitate RDP lateral movement:

The commands listed under this category appear to be using the reg command-line utility to interact with the Windows Registry.² They seem to be modifying specific registry keys and values related to Remote Desktop Services.

While the full commands and registry paths are partially obscured, the structure suggests commands similar to the following:

reg add "[Registry Key Path]" /v "[Value Name]" /t REG_DWORD /d [Data] /f
reg add "[Registry Key Path]" /v "[Value Name]" /t REG_SZ /d "[Data]" /f

You can see modifications to keys under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\ which is a common area for RDP configuration. The specific values being modified (like fDenyTSConnections) are often associated with enabling or disabling RDP.³

In summary:

The commands used involve:

• netsh advfirewall for configuring the local firewall to allow RDP traffic.
• reg add for modifying registry settings related to enabling or configuring Remote Desktop Services.⁴

It's important to note that without the full, unobscured commands, this analysis is based on the visible structure and common practices for enabling RDP through command-line utilities.