Cobalt Strike 3.4 introduced a Kill Date feature. This is a date that Cobalt Strike embeds into each Beacon stage. If a Beacon artifact is run on or after this date, it immediately exits. If a running Beacon wakes up on or after this date, it immediately exits. I don’t see kill dates as a […]
CTA Type: Resource
Cobalt Strike 3.4 – Operational Details
Cobalt Strike 3.4 is now available. This release focuses on the DNS Beacon and a few additions to Malleable C2. Here are the highlights: New Malleable C2 Options This release extends the Malleable C2 feature with several useful options. The dns_idle option allows you to change the IP address the DNS Beacon uses to signal that […]
Why is rundll32.exe connecting to the internet?
Previously, I wrote a blog post to answer the question: why is notepad.exe connecting to the internet? This post was written in response to a generation of defenders zeroing in on the notepad.exe malware epidemic that was plaguing them. Many offensive actions require spawning a new process to inject something into. In the Metasploit Framework (and […]
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HOWTO: Reset Your Cobalt Strike License Key
Time to time, I hand out Cobalt Strike license keys to non-customers. Sometimes these are to support an event (e.g., the National CCDC Red Team). Other times, these license keys allow a potential customer to evaluate Cobalt Strike without the deliberate tells present in the trial. Cobalt Strike’s license key is primarily used with the […]
Gettin’ Down with Aggressor Script
Aggressor Script is the scripting engine in Cobalt Strike 3.0 and later. As much as possible, I tried to make Cobalt Strike’s scripting feel like the scripting you would find in a modern IRC client. In this post, I’d like to take you through some resources and third-party examples to help you become familiar with […]
Who let the logs out? Woof.
Logging is an important feature in any red team operations platform. Logs serve multiple purposes. Good logs aid reporting. If an operator needs output for some action or forgot what they did and when, logs help refresh the operator’s memory. Good logs also help with ground truth. Anyone who has worked red operations long enough […]
Talk to your children about Payload Staging
Time to time, I find myself in an email exchange about payload security and payload staging. The payload security discussion revolves around Beacon’s security features. Once it is running on target, Beacon takes steps to authenticate its controller and establish a session-specific key to decrypt tasks and encrypt output. I discuss these security features at the end […]
What is a stageless payload artifact?
I’ve had a few questions about Cobalt Strike’s stageless payloads and how these compare to other payload varieties. In this blog post, I’ll explain stageless payloads and why you might prefer stageless payload artifacts in different situations. What is payload staging? A stageless payload artifact is an artifact [think executable, DLL, etc.] that runs a […]
Session Passing from Cobalt Strike
Session passing is using one payload to spawn another payload. Sometimes, the payloads are from the same toolset. Other times, they’re not. Session passing options allow you to hand-off accesses between toolkits and infrastructure. In this blog post, I’ll take you through the session passing options in Cobalt Strike. Multi-server Cobalt Strike (Beacon) If you […]
HOWTO: Port Forwards through a SOCKS proxy
Recently, I’ve had multiple people ask about port forwards with Cobalt Strike’s Beacon payload. Beacon has had SOCKS proxy pivoting support since June 2013. This feature opens a SOCKS proxy server on the team server. Each SOCKS server instance is associated with an individual Beacon. All requests and traffic sent to a Cobalt Strike SOCKS server […]