Cobalt Strike is the industry-standard adversary simulation platform trusted by red teams worldwide for conducting sophisticated security assessments and threat emulation exercises. Founded by Raphael Mudge in 2012, Cobalt Strike pioneered the modern red team command and control framework, enabling security professionals to replicate advanced persistent threat behaviors and strengthen organizational defenses through realistic attack simulations.
What Sets Cobalt Strike Apart?
Our Team's Expertise
Offensive Security Research & Development
The Cobalt Strike team brings together world-class offensive security researchers and developers with field experience and proficiency across multiple domains critical to modern adversary simulation and red team operations.
Our research team drives continuous innovation in threat emulation techniques. Team members specialize in developing evasion capabilities, crafting novel tradecraft, and ensuring Cobalt Strike remains at the forefront of offensive security tooling. This includes advancing sleep mask implementations for in-memory evasion, exploring LLVM-based obfuscation through initiatives like the Mutator Kit, and developing new approaches to post-exploitation tradecraft. The research function is dedicated to enabling red teams to apply the latest TTPs and bypass modern defensive technologies.
Software Engineering & Platform Development
Our engineering team combines extensive software development expertise with hands-on red teaming experience. This practical knowledge informs product development, ensuring that Cobalt Strike's architecture supports both ease of use and advanced customization. Engineers focus on core product stability, expanding configuration options while simplifying workflows, and building extensibility frameworks that allow operators and the community to enhance Cobalt Strike's capabilities.
Beyond core platform work, team members have contributed their own tools to the Community Kit, including tooling for lateral movement, credential and token manipulation, Kerberos security, process injection, operational security (OPSEC), anti-forensics, and EDR evasion. This reflects the team’s close connection to the practitioner community.
Meet The Authors
Chris Thorpe
Principal Software Engineer, Cobalt Strike Development
Fortra's Cobalt Strike
Let's Talk About How Cobalt Strike Can Help
Community Engagement
Cobalt Strike has cultivated one of the most active and knowledgeable user communities in offensive security. Our team maintains a consistent presence on the Bloodhound Slack Aggressor channel, Red Siege Discord, and Zero Point Security channels. We've introduced the Cobalt Strike Community Award to recognize outstanding contributions to our ecosystem, celebrating users who develop custom loaders, Beacon Object Files, and aggressor scripts that enhance capabilities for all operators.
Ongoing Commitment to Excellence
Through continued research and development, Cobalt Strike evolves to meet the changing needs of red teams facing increasingly sophisticated defensive technologies. Our focus remains on ease of use while expanding configuration options, enabling novel tradecraft through new capabilities, and strengthening interoperability with complementary offensive security tools including Core Impact and Outflank Security Tooling.
A Key Part of Fortra
Cobalt Strike is proud to be a part of Fortra's comprehensive cybersecurity portfolio. Fortra simplifies today's complex cybersecurity landscape by bringing complementary products together to solve problems in innovative ways. These integrated, scalable solutions address the fast-changing challenges organizations face in safeguarding their networks. With complete visibility across the attack chain, access to threat intelligence spanning the globe, and flexible solution delivery, Fortra customers can anticipate adversarial behavior and strengthen their defenses in real time.