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
MD5
- aa5e8268e741346c76ebfd1f27941a14
SHA-256
- 2f92d416f73472db1ebe880b3bec677bcb1d96d6ad62974da00b4be5f6d61f5b
SHA-1
- a6772c80f51d3805d5704f02a80e08501b133fac
Remediation
- Block the threat indicators at their respective controls.
- Search for IOCs in your environment.