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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“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 […]
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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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 […]
Read More… from So, you won a regional and you’re headed to National CCDC
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 […]
Read More… from Cobalt Strike 2.4 – A Pittance for Post-Exploitation
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 […]
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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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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