When I think about defense in the current era, I think of it as a game of instrumentation and telemetry. A well-instrumented endpoint provides a defense team and an automated security solution with the potential to react to or have visibility into a lot of events on a system. I say a lot, because certainly […]
Read More… from Pushing back on userland hooks with Cobalt Strike
Core Impact 20.3 has shipped this week. With this release, we’re revealing patterns for interoperability between Core Impact and Cobalt Strike. In this post, I’ll walk you through these patterns and provide advice on how to get benefit using Cobalt Strike and Core Impact together. A Red Team Operator’s Introduction to Core Impact Prior to […]
Read More… from Agent Deployed: Core Impact and Cobalt Strike Interoperability
I spent a little time looking into Saleforce’s JARM tool released in November. JARM is an active tool to probe the TLS/SSL stack of a listening internet application and generate a hash that’s unique to that specific TLS/SSL stack. One of the initial JARM fingerprints of interest relates to Cobalt Strike. The value associated with Cobalt […]
Cobalt Strike’s update process was degraded due to a data center outage that affected https://verify.cobaltstrike.com. The verify server is back up and the functionality of our update process is restored. Here’s the timeline of the incident: November 10, 2020 – 5:15pm EST The Cobalt Strike update process is degraded. You may still download and update […]
Cobalt Strike 4.2 is now available. This release overhauls our user exploitation features, adds more memory flexibility options to Beacon, adds more behavior flexibility to our post-exploitation features, and makes some nice changes to Malleable C2 too. User Exploitation Redux Cobalt Strike’s screenshot tool and keystroke logger are examples of user exploitation tools. These capabilities are […]
Read More… from Cobalt Strike 4.2 – Everything but the kitchen sink
Cobalt Strike can use PowerShell, .NET, and Reflective DLLs for its post-exploitation features. This is the weaponization problem set. How to take things, developed outside the tool, and create a path to use them in the tool. One of the newest weaponization options in Cobalt Strike are Beacon Object Files. A Beacon Object File is […]
Read More… from Beacon Object File ADVENTURES: Some Zerologon, SMBGhost, and Situational Awareness
Cobalt Strike 4.1 is now available. This release introduces a new way to build post-ex tools that work with Beacon, pushes back on a generic shellcode detection strategy, and grants added protocol flexibility to the TCP and named pipe Beacons. Beacon Object Files Cobalt Strike has weaponization options for PowerShell, .NET, and Reflective DLLs. These […]
TL;DR a certificate for part of the Cobalt Strike update infrastructure changed. Download the 20200511 distribution package to avoid certificate verification errors. If you recently ran the Cobalt Strike update program (version 20191204); you may see a nice message about the failed SSL certificate verification for verify.cobaltstrike.com: verify.cobaltstrike.com hosts a text file with SHA256 hashes […]
I founded Strategic Cyber LLC in 2012 to advocate a vision of threat-representative security testing. Over time, Cobalt Strike became the de facto commercial standard for red team operations and adversary simulations. I’ve long asked myself, how do I stay a good partner to my customers as their numbers grow and this field evolves? Today is a […]
Read More… from Cobalt Strike joins Core Impact at HelpSystems, LLC (now Fortra)
Cobalt Strike 4.0 is now available. This release improves Cobalt Strike’s distributed operations model, revises post-exploitation workflows to drop some historical baggage, and adds “Bring Your Own Weaponization” workflows for privilege escalation and lateral movement. A Vision for Red Team Server Consolidation Cobalt Strike’s model for distributed operations (2013!) is to stand up a new server for […]
Read More… from Cobalt Strike 4.0 – Bring Your Own Weaponization