When the Shadow Crosses Over
Ilya Yatsenko
BSides NYC 2025 (0x05) · Day 1 · Tech - Red
In his BSides NYC talk, "When the Shadow Crosses Over," Ilya Yatsenko, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, delved into the often-overlooked and powerful Remote Desktop Services (RDS) shadowing feature in Windows. The presentation addressed a long-standing challenge for offensive security professionals: how to monitor or interact with an active user session on a remote Windows system without interrupting the legitimate user. Yatsenko’s research culminated in a practical, open-source method to leverage this capability from a Linux host, a significant improvement over the traditional, cumbersome approach requiring a dedicated Windows virtual machine.
AI review
First-time presenter drops a genuinely useful offensive contribution: RDS shadowing from Linux via an xfreerdp parsing fallback, implemented in impacket. Not groundbreaking research, but honest, practical work that solves a real operational annoyance — and that's worth something at BSides.