I’m spending a lot of time with mimikatz lately. I’m fascinated by how much capability it has and I’m constantly asking myself, what’s the best way to use this during a red team engagement? A hidden gem in mimikatz is its ability to create a trust relationship from a username and password hash. Here’s the […]
CTA Type: Blog
An unnecessary addiction to DNS communication
I regularly hear stories from my users about how they got past a tough situation and had success that they claim was not possible without Cobalt Strike. As a developer, these emails are fun to read, and they give me a lot of job satisfaction. One of the features these users love is DNS Beacon. […]
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2015’s Red Team Tradecraft
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End […]
User-defined Storage-based Covert Communication
One of my favorite Cobalt Strike technologies is Malleable C2. This is a domain specific language for user-defined storage-based covert communication. That’s just a fancy way of saying that you, the operator, have control over what Cobalt Strike’s Beacon looks like when it communicates with you. When I do red team work, I see the […]
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So, you won a regional and you’re headed to National CCDC
The 2015 National CCDC season started with 100+ teams across 10 regions. Now, there are 10 teams left and they’re headed to the National CCDC event next week. If you’re on one of those student teams, this blog post is for you. I’d like to take you inside the red team room and give you […]
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Cobalt Strike 2.4 – A Pittance for Post-Exploitation
Cobalt Strike 2.4 is now available. If you use Beacon for post-exploitation, you’ll find a lot to like in this release. Here’s the highlights: Post-Exploitation Jobs Beacon now supports long-running jobs. These are post-exploitation tasks that live in other processes and report information to Beacon as it becomes available. Beacon’s keystroke logger was rewritten to take advantage […]
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Reverse Port Forward through a SOCKS Proxy
I had a friend come to me with an interesting problem. He had to get a server to make an outbound connection and evade some pretty tough egress restrictions. Egress is a problem I care a lot about [1, 2, 3]. Beacon is a working option for his Windows systems. Unfortunately, the server in question […]
Training Recommendations for Threat Emulation and Red Teaming
A few weeks ago, I had someone write and ask which training courses I would recommend to help setup a successful Red Team program. If you find yourself asking this question, you may find this post valuable. First things first, you’ll want to define the goals of your red team and what value it’s going […]
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The First Five Minutes
March and April are CCDC season. This is the time of the year when teams of college students get to compete against each other as they operate and defend a representative enterprise network from a professional red team. CCDC events are the most interesting for the blue teams and red teams when the red team […]
Scripting Beacons and Deploying Persistence
One common Cobalt Strike feature request is an API to script the Beacon payload. Doing this right is a big project and it requires some architectural changes within Cobalt Strike. I’m working on it. I have a major development effort underway to reshape Beacon’s role in Cobalt Strike. Scripting is one piece of this. Right […]