What happens when your advantages become a disadvantage? That’s the theme of Fighting the Toolset. This lecture discusses Offensive PowerShell, staging, memory-injected DLLs, and remote process injection as technologies that deliver(ed) a universal advantage to attackers. Today, that’s not always the case. In some contexts, these technologies are the tell that gives you away. In […]
CTA Type: Blog
Cobalt Strike 3.11 – The snake that eats its tail
Cobalt Strike 3.11 is now available. This release adds to Cobalt Strike’s in-memory threat emulation and evasion capabilities, adds a means to run .NET executable assemblies without touching disk, and implements the Token Duplication UAC bypass attack. In-Memory Threat Emulation One of the things that makes Cobalt Strike different is its ability to emulate multiple […]
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Beware of Slow Downloads
I often receive emails that ask about slow file downloads with the Beacon payload. Here are the symptoms: When I get these emails, I usually ask the user about their Malleable C2 profile. Malleable C2 is a technology to change the network and memory indicators for Cobalt Strike’s Beacon payload. In some cases, it can alter the […]
In-Memory Evasion
Many analysts and automated solutions take advantage of various memory detections to find injected DLLs in memory. Memory detections look at the properties (and content) of processes, threads, and memory to find indicators of malicious activity in the current process. In-memory Evasion is a four-part mini course on the cat and mouse game related to […]
Cobalt Strike 3.10 – Хакер vs. 肉雞
Cobalt Strike 3.10 is now available. This release adds Unicode support to the Beacon payload, introduces a built-in report based on MITRE’s ATT&CK matrix, and performs endodontics on the Beacon payload. A Strategy for Unicode One of Cobalt Strike’s limitations is its ham-fisted handling of text. Cobalt Strike treats everything sent to and received from Beacon as binary […]
Modern Defenses and YOU!
Part 9 of Advanced Threat Tactics covers a lot of my thoughts on evasion. The ideas in that lecture are still relevant, the defenses discussed there didn’t go away! That said, there are other defenses and realities offensive operators must contend with today. This blog post discusses some of these and provides tips for adjusting […]
Kits, Profiles, and Scripts… Oh my!
If I had to describe Cobalt Strike in one word, I’d say ‘flexible’. There are a lot of options to control Cobalt Strike’s features and indicators. In this post, I’ll introduce these options, explain the rationale for each, and point you to resources to explore them further. Aggressor Script Aggressor Script is Cobalt Strike’s built-in […]
Cobalt Strike 3.9 – Livin’ in a Stager’s Paradise
Cobalt Strike 3.9 is now available. This release brings several additions to Malleable C2 with an emphasis on staging flexibility. Malleable HTTP/S Staging Stagers are tiny programs that download the Beacon payload and pass control to it. Stagers are a way to use a size-constrained attack to deliver a large payload like Beacon. While I recommend […]
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OPSEC Considerations for Beacon Commands
Update January 9, 2020 – This topic is now part of the Cobalt Strike documentation. Head over to the Beacon Command Behavior page for the latest version of this information. A good operator knows their tools and has an idea of how the tool is accomplishing its objectives on their behalf. This blog post surveys […]
Cobalt Strike 3.8 – Who’s Your Daddy?
Cobalt Strike 3.8 is now available. This release adds features to spawn processes with an alternate parent process. This release also gives the operator control over the script templates Cobalt Strike uses in its attacks and workflows. Processes with Alternate Parents A favorite hunt technique is to instrument a host to report all new processes, […]