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Proactive Defense: The Importance of Incident Response Planning in Cybersecurity
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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
- 1025b2ef4b2904353bd4a8c14a1d1c12
SHA-256
- 354b1de4193f85cad84c3199344363570f98bc6465eba2c1d6eda1f06ad71cbd
SHA-1
- 4b98db53dd3b70c787593ce60901706d738db854
Remediation
- Block all threat indicators at your respective controls.
- Search for IOCs in your enviornment.