Therefore, all these data highlight our need as a defender to be aware and up to date regarding the threat posed by the use of Cobalt Strike for malicious purposes.Ĭobalt Strike works in a client/server mode. Overall, in Q4 of 2020, 66% of all ransomware attacks involved Cobalt Strike payloads.
In 2020, it was seen as one the most leveraged pentesting tools by attackers, alongside Mimikatz and PowerShell Empire.
To mention just a few examples, it has been leveraged in the recent advanced and state-sponsored SolarWinds supply chain attacks, as well as in the frequent and offensive campaigns conducted by different cybercriminals groups such as Wizard Spider, and the Egregor group ultimately delivering ransomware payloads.
#EDIT COBALT STRIKE BEACON CRACK#
However, over the last years, it’s purposes were hijacked by attackers who managed to crack its official versions and leverage them in their attacks thus taking advantage of Cobalt Strike’s remote access and defense evasion capabilities.Ĭobalt Strike is now widely being used by threat actors regardless of their capabilities, skill sets, the sophistication of their attacks or the objectives of their campaigns. It aims at mimicking threat actors’ tactics, techniques and procedures to test the defenses of the target. Well, as shown on the figure above, the answer is Cobalt Strike.Ĭobalt Strike is a commercial, post-exploitation agent, designed to allow pentesters to execute attacks and emulate post-exploitation actions of advanced threat actors. We also describe ways to detect: (i) Cobalt Strike payloads such as the DNS beacon based on the nature and volume of Cobalt Strike DNS requests, (ii) Cobalt Strike privilege escalation with the Cobalt Strike built-in service svc-exe, (iii) Cobalt Strike lateral movement with the Cobalt Strike built-in service PsExec and (iv) Cobalt Strike beacons communication through named pipes.
#EDIT COBALT STRIKE BEACON HOW TO#
We show examples of how to track Cobalt Strike command and control servers (C2) and Malleable profiles by focusing on their SSL certificates and HTTP responses. In this blogpost, we describe step by step how to ensure a proactive and defensive posture against Cobalt Strike, one of the most powerful pentesting tools hijacked by attackers in their numerous campaigns. Here, we are tackling a much bigger threat given the frequency it is abused by diverse threat actors. In the last SEKOIA.IO Threat & Detection Lab we dealt with a Man-in-the-middle (MITM) phishing attack leveraging Evilginx2, an offensive tool allowing two-factor authentication bypass.
0 kommentar(er)
