For an in-depth technical analysis of Cobalt Strike’s deployment options and how they differ, check out Avast’s blog or this Cisco Talos white paper. This flexibility has helped attackers find many unconventional and creative ways to infect victims with a payload. How has Cobalt Strike been deployed?Ĭobalt Strike has many different ways for deployment. Depending on how the code is delivered, the code can be injected into other legitimate running processes, bypassing defenses that do not scan legitimate processes or code in-memory. This opens up a ton of possibilities for how this shellcode is shipped, making signature-based detection on the delivery method a cat and mouse game. Cobalt Strike stagers are designed to be loaded and executed only in-memory. This, combined with the ability to configure many parts of the payload, makes hash-based detection almost impossible. This makes static analysis difficult to conduct. Cobalt Strike payloads are usually shellcode encrypted with a rolling XOR key. Why is it difficult to detect Cobalt Strike?Ĭobalt Strike is difficult to detect because of its several defense techniques. It also comes with the feature to generate reporting in which the attacking team or threat actor can continuously study and improve their campaigns. It is evident why Cobalt Strike is used by organizations and threat actors alike because of the extensive suite of capabilities it possesses, and also due to its ability to bypass defenses. This tool is mainly used in red team operations for government agencies and private enterprises, but it’s also a popular tool leveraged by cybercrime and APT groups in cracked versions. Inject malicious code into legitimate processes. ![]()
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