Background A government agency responsible for critical public services commissions a Red Team engagement to assess its cybersecurity resilience. The exercise simulates an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack, testing the agency’s ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats targeting sensitive government data, public infrastructure, and national security. Phase 1: Initial Access Operations The […]
Cornerstone: Red Team
Red Team Use Case: Financial Institution
Background A large financial institution conducts an assumed breach exercise to test its cybersecurity resilience. The Red Team is tasked with simulating an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack, while the Blue Team monitors, detects, and mitigates threats in real-time. Phase 1: Initial Access Operations The Red Team conducts reconnaissance on the Financial Institution’s employees using […]
Red Team Use Case: Hospital Network
Background A regional hospital network conducts a Red Team engagement to evaluate its cybersecurity defenses. The exercise aims to simulate a sophisticated cyberattack targeting patient data, medical devices, and critical infrastructure, testing the hospital’s ability to detect, respond to, and recover from an intrusion. Phase 1: Initial Access Operations The Red Team begins by gathering […]
Industry
One of the original public red team command and control frameworks, Cobalt Strike has become the red teaming toolkit of choice across the finance, government, and healthcare sectors. We understand the unique threat types targeting your industry, and we give you the flexibility, interoperability, and payload generation needed to stay ahead of cyberattacks. Get out […]
Cobalt Strike On-Demand Demo (CTA)
From its malleable Command and Control framework to its advanced post-exploitation capabilities, get an overview of Cobalt Strike’s core features in our on-demand demo. See how this tool prioritizes operational flexibility and stability to stand apart and why red team experts consider Cobalt Strike a vital security testing tool. Watch Cobalt Strike Demo. […]
A Simple Guide to Successful Red Teaming
As threat actors innovate their tactics, security teams need to match them step for step. We can’t fight new and complex threats with old and predictable techniques. It’s time that the gloves come off and that organizations subject their networks, cloud resources, and internal assets to not only real-world threats, but real-world attacks – and […]
Revisiting the UDRL Part 3: Beacon User Data
The UDRL and the Sleepmask are key components of Cobalt Strike’s evasion strategy, yet historically they have not worked well together. For example, prior to CS 4.10, Beacon statically calculated its location in memory using a combination of its base address and its section table. This calculation was then modified depending on the contents of […]
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Introducing the Mutator Kit: Creating Object File Monstrosities with Sleep Mask and LLVM
This is a joint blog written by William Burgess (@joehowwolf) and Henri Nurmi (@HenriNurmi). In our ‘Cobalt Strike and YARA: Can I Have Your Signature?’ blog post, we highlighted that the sleep mask is a common target for in-memory YARA signatures. In that post we recommended using the evasive sleep mask option to scramble the […]
Revisiting the User-Defined Reflective Loader Part 2: Obfuscation and Masking
This is the second installment in a series revisiting the User-Defined Reflective Loader (UDRL). In part one, we aimed to simplify the development and debugging of custom loaders and introduced the User-Defined Reflective Loader Visual Studio (UDRL-VS) template. In this installment, we’ll build upon the original UDRL-VS loader and explore how to apply our own […]
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Cobalt Strike and YARA: Can I Have Your Signature?
Over the past few years, there has been a massive proliferation of YARA signatures for Beacon. We know from conversations with our customers that this has become problematic when using Cobalt Strike for red team engagements and that there has been some confusion over how Cobalt Strike’s malleable C2 options can help. Therefore, this blog […]
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