Our detection opportunities from last year’s Threat Detection Report remain effective. The security community has shared invaluable public resources on analyzing and detecting Cobalt Strike. Keep in mind that although many of these methods of detection can be easily bypassed with changes to the Cobalt Strike configurations, we highly suggest using them as a stopgap until your teams develop more advanced methods. baselining the prevalence of reconnaissance commands.Some of the more common detection strategies documented in public reporting include: Luckily for defenders, over the course of this past year the security community has produced a plethora of great technical analysis and detection opportunities around preventing and investigating Cobalt Strike. The security community is embracing the fact that whatever functional label you place on Cobalt Strike, it’s here to stay, it’s implicated in all variety of intrusions, and it’s our duty to defend against it. Red teams and penetration testers use Cobalt Strike to demonstrate the risk of a breach and evaluate mature security programs.
This opens up a world of possibility for post-exploitation. Cobalt Strike is threat emulation software. Import a script into Beacon and invoke its cmdlets at will. Beacon executes PowerShell scripts, logs keystrokes, takes screenshots, downloads files, and spawns other payloads.
Beacon is Cobalt Strike’s payload to model an advanced actor. Some of the most notorious ransomware operators- including groups like Conti, Ryuk, and REvil/Sodinokibi-are known to rely heavily on Cobalt Strike in their attacks. Cobalt Strike's Beacon now has the ability to work with PowerShell. The Cobalt Strike tool is used to drop beacons as they execute remote surveillance on infected networks and can be used to facilitate ransomware attacks. Its speed, flexibility, and advanced features are likely contributing factors as to why ransomware attacks have been ticking upward in recent years. Adversaries-ransomware operators in particular-rely substantially on Cobalt Strike’s core functionalities as they seek to deepen their foothold in their victims’ environments. Cobalt Strike has never been more popular, as adversaries are increasingly adopting it as their favorite C2 tool.