Living on the Edge: Abuse of Microsoft Edge for Persistence
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Alex Brown - BSides London 2025
Alex Brown No video found
This talk explores Microsoft Edge’s Secure Preferences file as a persistence vector. We’ll dive into how Chromium-based browsers store and protect user settings, demonstrate how these protections can be defeated, and highlight which settings can be abused to maintain access on a compromised system. Attendees will learn how to modify Edge’s start-up URL to deliver phishing content, leverage IE Mode to launch a Java applet and execute code locally without user interaction, and silently install extensions (even in environments with extension whitelisting). The talk concludes with detection and mitigation guidance for defenders.