Bypassing Enterprise Protection Solutions and Windows 11 OS Hardening Controls

Training Ground | 9 February 2025



Training abstract

With growing usage of desktop applications in various segments like aviation, healthcare, public infrastructure, logistics, finance, education, hospitality and many more in the form of kiosk / un-attended systems in public, it opens scope of information & network security. Also with change in way of work getting flexible from home due to Covid-19, this increases the responsibilities of enterprises to have their systems run safely using multiple endpoint protection tools like DLP/EDR/KIOSK/PAM etc..
This training course would target such areas where systems are secured via hardening using Windows/3rd party tools and how we can evade hardening to gain unrestricted system access. After having system access trying to elevate privilege within the Windows system. Learning these techniques would help in pentest, designing tools securely which can be used in commercial products or enterprise systems.

Training Outline

Setting up OS Hardening with custom scripts, which would demonstrate what changes are made so that participants can visualize their scope.
Windows 11 KIOSK Bypass techniques to access restricted windows components like creds. manager, certificate store, registry, filesystem, etc.
Various techniques to access command prompt / powershell when blocked by system administrator in Windows 11 Accessing restricted Control Panel components in Windows 11
Working with deploying multiple 3rd party KIOSK/Hardening endpoint protection apps. And exploiting multiple vulnerabilities which underwent CVD.
Creating Shell Explorer by self and designing KIOSK to understand the nature of Winlogon while hardening. Applocker restriction rules and various bypass techniques
Using ReactOS to evade signature based application restriction



Who should take this training:

Pentesters, Security architects or developers who want to have security by design in their products, Windows administrators, security professionals from IT security or students.

Who would not be a good fit for this training:

People focusing on any other OS apart from Windows, People Looking for Network Assessments/core Anti-virus evasion/Fuzzing/Kernel exploitation.

Audience level:

Beginners

Student Requirement:

Basic Knowledge of how Windows OS & Virtual Machines works
Although there would be few small scripts used during the session, it's completely fine if you do not have scripting/programming knowledge.
Windows 11 Enterprise 64bit Evaluation VirtualBox VM (If you do not have license make use of use https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-enterprise)

Aravind C Ajayan

Sr. Security Engineer with Philips and is part of the Security Centre of Excellence team. Aravind's primary areas of expertise are web/thick client application penetration testing, hardened system security, network security, and windows active directory security. He has helped to fix severe issues in IMS(Internet Management Software) solutions through responsible disclosures.

Aravind pursued his master's in Cyber Security Systems and Networks from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. He is an Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) and has published several research papers on security in IEEE and Springer.





Karthik Lalan

Product Security Engineer @ Security Centre of Excellence – Philips Innovation Campus. He is M.Tech. in CS with Specialization in Information & Network Security.

He conducts frequent talks and workshops on InfoSec topics @ several places including C0C0N, DEFCON BHV, Bsides Delhi & Bangalore Chapter, OWASP, Null A'bad & Bangalore Chapter, DroidCon-IN. Kartik loves to write technical Blogs in his leisure time.