Severity
High
Analysis Summary
Cobalt Strike first appeared in 2012 in response to alleged flaws in the Metasploit Framework, an existing red team (penetration testing) tool. Cobalt Strike 3.0 was released in 2015 as a stand-alone opponent emulation platform. However, researchers began observing threat actors using Cobalt Strike by 2016. Cobalt Strike’s use in hostile activities was previously connected with huge cybercriminal operations like TA3546 and APT40. Two-thirds of detected Cobalt hit efforts from 2016 to 2018 were attributable to well-resourced cybercrime organizations or APT groups, according to researchers.
Cobalt Strike lets the attacker install a ‘Beacon’ agent on the target PC which provides the attacker with a plethora of capabilities, including command execution, file transfer, keylogging, mimikatz, port scanning, and privilege escalation. Cobalt Strike includes a toolkit called Artifact Kit that is used to create shellcode loaders.
Impact
- Data Exfiltration
- Information Theft
Indicators of Compromise
IP
- 52[.]15[.]81[.]204
MD5
- 300bd2c447ad9e271b60c7d36fe3cb7c
- 9d11dcd320339ba7e2d28493eb412a6c
SHA-256
- 2fe7b81253f7726822e0f6ff1a3bacea73ca2356ca4dcb460493586629961ad0
- 9a8d634c047c0accd94c7e0dbf7f7b6c5f4d9cbcd6bba48d51549bd1568febb4
SHA-1
- 98457ae5a859ce5623f5c6ca68a374bf9118dd40
- 6b5681e35dbc1f9650856f53efed194c80b25c42
URL
- http[:]//52[.]15[.]81[.]204/mJRT
- http[:]//52[.]15[.]81[.]204/dot[.]gif
Remediation
- Block all threat indicators at your respective controls.
- Search for IOCs in your environment