Historically, Raphael Mudge, the creator of Cobalt Strike, didn’t typically talk about the Cobalt Strike roadmap publicly. He preferred to play his cards close to his chest and only revealed the details about each release when it went live (and he didn’t give much warning about the release date, either). That was his way of […]
CTA Type: Blog
Joe’s Transition
My career is taking me in a new and exciting direction, and I am stepping down from my role on the Cobalt Strike team. I’ve spent the last year helping Fortra (the new face of HelpSystems) integrate Cobalt Strike into their processes and shift from a single developer to a team effort. I can honestly […]
Incorporating New Tools into Core Impact
Core Impact has further enhanced the pen testing process with the introduction of two new modules. The first module enables the use of .NET assemblies, while the second module provides the ability to use BloodHound, a data analysis tool that uncovers hidden relationships within an Active Directory (AD) environment. In this blog, we’ll dive into […]
Cobalt Strike Training Options
The Cobalt Strike training web page has been updated. https://www.cobaltstrike.com/training/ The training web page lists free courses created by the Cobalt Strike team that provide an overview of the product. It also lists courses offered by trusted 3rd parties. The 3rd party courses use Cobalt Strike to some degree and can be a great way […]
Writing Beacon Object Files: Flexible, Stealthy, and Compatible
Our colleagues over at Core Security have been doing great things with Cobalt Strike, making use of it in their own engagements. They wrote up this post on creating Cobalt Strike Beacon Object Files using the MinGW compiler on Linux. It covers several ideas and best practices that will increase the quality of your BOFs. […]
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User Defined Reflective Loader (UDRL) Update in Cobalt Strike 4.5
The User Defined Reflective Loader (UDRL) was first introduced in Cobalt Strike 4.4. to allow the creation and use of a custom reflective loader. This quickly took off by the community and its limits were pushed. Updates were made in 4.5 to help address some of these limits. Updates Increased Size A new hook BEACON_DLL_SIZE […]
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Sleep Mask Update in Cobalt Strike 4.5
The Sleep Mask Kit was first introduced in Cobalt Strike 4.4 to allow users to modify how the sleep mask function looks in memory in order to defeat static signatures that identified Beacon. This quickly took off in the community and its limits were pushed. Updates were made in 4.5 to help address some of these limits. Licensed users can download the updated kit from […]
A Deeper Look Into the Max Retry Strategy Option
A complementary strategy to the Host Rotation Strategy was introduced to Cobalt Strike 4.5. The max retry strategy was added to HTTP, HTTPS, and DNS beacon listeners. A max retry strategy allows a beacon to exit after a specified failure count. As the failure count increases, sleep is adjusted to a specified value. By default, […]
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Process Injection Update in Cobalt Strike 4.5
Process injection is a core component to Cobalt Strike post exploitation. Until now, the option was to use a built-in injection technique using fork&run. This has been great for stability, but does come at the cost of OPSEC. Cobalt Strike 4.5 now supports two new Aggressor Script hooks: PROCESS_INJECT_SPAWN and PROCESS_INJECT_EXPLICIT. These hooks allow a user to define how the fork&run and explicit injection techniques are implemented when executing post-exploitation […]
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Cobalt Strike 4.5: Fork&Run – you’re “history”
Cobalt Strike 4.5 is now available. This release sees new options for process injection, updates to the sleep mask and UDRL kits, evasion improvements and a command history update along with other, smaller changes. Security Updates Before getting into the details of the release, I just wanted to impress upon you how seriously we take […]
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