The open-source Metasploit Framework and its implant, called Meterpreter, were used in malicious attacks long before Cobalt Strike. It’s worth noting that Cobalt Strike is not the only such penetration testing framework available or the only one that’s being abused by cybercriminals. The server also includes an assortment of delivery templates in JavaScript, VBA macros and PowerShell that the attacker can use to execute shellcode on the target machine, which would then connect back to the team server over one of several supported protocols (HTTPS, SMB, and DNS) to download the Beacon. It is distributed as single Java archive file (JAR), which contains several components: a command-and-control server known as the Team Server, a client that runs on the attacker’s machine and includes the graphical user interface to interact with the server, and a remote access implant known as the Beacon deployed on the victim machine. What is Cobalt Strike?Ĭobalt Strike is a highly customizable attack framework intended to be used by penetration testers and security red teams to simulate a real cyberthreat. Nowadays, most ransomware programs are manually deployed, often as the last step in an attack, after hackers have already been in the network for days or weeks and worked their way up to domain admin access. One attack category where this has been evident is ransomware, which used to spread through networks using automated exploits and drop the same ransom note to everyone. Seeing the success of this tactic, many cybercriminal gangs also started to shift their approach from using highly automated malware with self-propagation capabilities that tried to infect as many systems as possible to find a weak entry point for the deployment of a lightweight implant for remote access and then moving laterally manually by using open source network scanners, credential dumpers, legitimate privilege escalation tools, and so on. Security vendors are also reluctant to flag some of these tools as malicious, due to the high risk of false positives. These groups rightly understood that abusing the same tools that IT or security teams commonly use in their work environments will challenge the malware detection and prevention controls that organizations had in place. The use of this tactic, known as living off the land (LOTL), used to be a telltale sign of sophisticated cyberespionage groups who moved laterally through environments using manual hacking and placed great value on stealth. The abuse by attackers of system administration, forensic, or security tools that are either already installed on systems or can be easily deployed without raising suspicion has become extremely common. Cobalt Strike is a commercial attack framework designed for red teams that has also been adopted by many threat actors, from APT groups to ransomware gangs and other cybercriminals. Google recently released a list of YARA detection rules for malicious variants of the legitimate Cobalt Strike penetration testing framework that are being used by hackers in the wild.
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