We’re often asked, “what does Cobalt Strike do?” In simple terms, Cobalt Strike is a post-exploitation framework for adversary simulations and Red Teaming to help measure your security operations program and incident response capabilities. Cobalt Strike provides a post-exploitation agent, Beacon, and covert channels to emulate a quiet long-term embedded actor in a network.
If we as security testers and red teamers continue to test in the same ways during each engagement, our audience (i.e., the defensive side) will not get much value out of the exercises. It’s important to be nimble. Cobalt Strike provides substantial flexibility for users to change their behavior and adapt just as an adversary does. For example, Malleable C2 is a Command and Control language that lets you modify memory and network indicators to control how Beacon looks and feels on a network.
Cobalt Strike was designed to be multiplayer. One of its foundational features is its ability to support for multiple users to access multiple servers and share sessions. Enabling participation from users with different styles and skillsets further varies behavior to enrich engagements.
While there are also numerous built-in capabilities, one of which we’ll discuss below, they are limited to what the team adds to the tool. One of our favorite features of Cobalt Strike is its user developed modules, through which many of the built-in limits are overcome. In fact, users are encouraged to extend its capabilities with complementary tools and scripts to tailor the engagements to best meet the organization’s needs. We wanted to highlight a few ways we’ve recently seen Cobalt Strike users doing just that to conduct effective assessments.
Interoperability with Core Impact
Contrary to many perceptions, Cobalt Strike is actually not a penetration testing tool. As we mentioned earlier, we identify as a tool for post-exploitation adversary simulations and Red Team operations. However, we have recently begun offering interoperability with Core Impact, which is a penetration testing tool with features that align well with those of Cobalt Strike.
Core Impact is typically used for exploitation and lateral movement and validating the attack paths often associated with a penetration test. Used by both in-house teams as well as third-party services, Core Impact offers capabilities for remote, local, and client-side exploitation. Impact also uses post-exploitation agents, which, while they don’t have a cool name like “Beacon,” are versatile in both their deployment and capabilities, including chaining and pivoting.
While a previous blog dives deeper into the particulars, to quickly summarize, the interoperability piece comes in the form of session passing between both platforms. Those with both tools can deploy Beacon from within Core Impact. Additionally, users can spawn an Impact agent from within Cobalt Strike. If you have Cobalt Strike and would like to learn more, we recommend requesting a trial of Core Impact to try it out.
Integration with Outflank’s RedELK Tool
RedELK is an open-source tool that has been described by its creators as a “Red Team’s SIEM.” This highly usable tool tracks and sends Red Teams alerts about the activities of a Blue Team by creating a centralized hub for all traffic logs from redirectors to be sent and enriched. Gaining visibility into the Blue Team’s movements enables Red Teams to make judicious choices about their next steps. These insights help Red Teams create a better learning experience and ensure Blue Teams get the most out of their engagements.
Additionally, it also centralizes and enriches all operational logs from teamservers in order to provide a searchable history of the operation, which could be particularly helpful for longer and larger engagements. This all sounds like an ideal integration for Cobalt Strike users, right? While the sub-header is a fairly large spoiler, it is nonetheless very exciting that RedELK does fully support the Cobalt Strike framework.
Community Kit Extensions
We can’t say enough good things about the user community. So many of you have written first-rate tools and scripts that have further escalated the power of Cobalt Strike—we feel like an artist’s muse and the art the community creates is amazing. However, many of these extensions are tricky to find, so not everyone has had the opportunity to take advantage and learn from them. In order to highlight all of this hard work, we’ve created the Community Kit. This central repository showcases projects from the user community to ensure that they’re more easily discovered by fellow security professionals.
We encourage you to check it out to see the fantastic work of your peers which can help take raise the level of your next security engagement and may even inspire you to create and submit your own. Check back regularly as new submissions are coming in frequently.
A Dynamic Framework
Cobalt Strike was intentionally built as an adaptable framework so that users could continually change their behavior in an engagement. However, this flexibility has also enabled both expected and unexpected growth of the tool itself. Planned additions like the interoperability with Core Impact allows users to benefit from session passing, while unanticipated extensions like those in the community kit are equally welcome, as they enable users to truly make the tool their own. Ultimately, we’re excited to see such dedication to this tool from all angles, as it motivates us all to keep advancing Cobalt Strike to the next level so users can keep increasing the value of every engagement.
Want to learn more about Core Impact?
Get information on other ways Core Impact and Cobalt Strike complement one another for comprehensive infrastructure protection.