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 […]
CTA Type: Resource
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 […]
Read More… from Training Recommendations for Threat Emulation and Red Teaming
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 […]
My Favorite PowerShell Post-Exploitation Tools
PowerShell became a key part of my red team toolkit in 2014. Cobalt Strike 2.1 added PowerShell support to the Beacon payload and this has made an amazing library of capability available to my users. In this post, I’d like to take you through a few of my favorite collections of PowerShell scripts. PowerSploit Let’s start […]
Read More… from My Favorite PowerShell Post-Exploitation Tools
Another Night, Another Actor
Earlier last year, I had a frantic call from a customer. They needed to make a small change to Beacon’s communication pattern and quickly. This customer was asked to spend a week with a network defense team and train them on different attacker tactics. Each day, my customer had to show the network defense team […]
DNS Communication is a Gimmick
I added DNS Communication to Cobalt Strike in June 2013 and refined it further in July 2013. On sales calls and at conferences I get a lot of questions and compliments on this feature. That’s great. I’ve also heard the opposite. I’ve heard folks say that DNS Command and Control is noisy. It’s “easy to […]
How I tunnel Meterpreter through Beacon
I write so many blog posts about Beacon, I should just give up and call this the Beacon blog. Beacon is Cobalt Strike’s post-exploitation agent that focuses on communication flexibility and added covert channels. It’s also possible to tunnel Meterpreter through Beacon with the meterpreter command. In this blog post, I’ll explain how this feature […]
Cobalt Strike 2.3 – I’ve always wanted runas
Cobalt Strike 2.3 is now available. This release adds a runas command to Beacon. This command allows you to specify a username and password for any user and run a command as them. Useful for situations where you know credentials for an admin and want to use them to elevate. Care to know the alternative? Shell Escalation using […]
Read More… from Cobalt Strike 2.3 – I’ve always wanted runas
Pass-the-(Golden)-Ticket with WMIC
One of my favorite blog posts from last year was the Adversary Tricks and Treats post from CrowdStrike. They showed how one of the actors they track changed their tactics to cope with a more alert defender. This actor, DEEP PANDA, sometimes injects a Golden Ticket onto their local Kerberos tray. To move laterally, this […]