I just returned from the North East Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition event at the University of Maine. A big congratulations to the winners, Northeastern University, who will go on to represent the North East region at the National event in April. The more I use Cobalt Strike 3.x, the more I appreciate Aggressor Script. Aggressor […]
CTA Type: Resource
Cobalt Strike 3.2 – The Inevitable x64 Beacon
Cobalt Strike 3.2, the third release in the 3.x series, is now available. The 3.2 release focuses on fixes and improvements across the Cobalt Strike product. x64 Beacon Cobalt Strike’s x86 Beacon plays pretty well in an x64 world. You can inject the keystroke logger and screenshot tools into 64-bit processes. If you run mimikatz […]
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A History of Cobalt Strike in Training Courses
In 2011, I was invited to Austin, TX by the local ISSA and OWASP chapters to teach a class on Armitage and the Metasploit Framework. I think we had 90 students. I remember the pain of burning DVDs in preparation for this class. Myself and two of the organizers agreed to split the DVD burning […]
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Cobalt Strike Tips for 2016 CCDC Red Teams
It’s CCDC season again. CCDC is the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Teams of students in 10 regions run simulated business networks and defend against red team attacks. The winners of these regional events square off at the National CCDC in San Antonio, TX. Strategic Cyber LLC is making Cobalt Strike available to the red teams at the regional and […]
The Threat Emulation Problem
There are a lot of people who talk about threat emulation. Use our super-duper-elitesy-neatsy-malware to emulate these tactics in your network. I say stuff like that too. It’s cool. In this post, I’d like to write about what threat emulation means to me, really. I see a red teams as offensive operators capable of executing […]
A Quick Guide to Bug Reports
One of the hardest parts of being a developer is working with bug reports and support requests disguised as bug reports. Some people write very good bug reports. These reports give me the information I need to reproduce the problem and advise from there. Others offer a vague description of their problem with no context. […]
Real-Time Feed of Red Team Activity
There are several research projects to collect raw data from red team activity, process this data, and try to turn it into information. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to instrument a Cobalt Strike team server and generate a real-time feed of engagement activity. Aggressor Script is the scripting engine in Cobalt Strike […]
Interoperability with the Metasploit Framework
Cobalt Strike 3.0 is a stand-alone platform for Adversary Simulations and Red Team Operations. It doesn’t depend on the Metasploit Framework. That said, the Metasploit Framework is a wealth of capability and there are places where it adds value. I didn’t forget this in my design of Cobalt Strike 3.0. In this blog post, I’ll […]
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Cobalt Strike 2015: An Offensive Platform is Born
It’s hard to believe we’re at the end of 2015 and on to 2016. I’ve now had a product on the market for three and a half years. That’s like 27 dog years! It’s a long time for a hacking tool too. 2015 was an exciting year here. Our industry is changing and Cobalt Strike has made changes to […]
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Windows Access Tokens and Alternate Credentials
I’d like to call your attention to the humble runas.exe program on Windows. This program allows a Windows user to spawn another program with another user’s credentials. It’s a little painful to use runas.exe from a remote access tool. This program doesn’t accept a password as an argument. Cobalt Strike’s Beacon has a built-in runas […]
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