Cobalt Strike
Intelligence Profile
Cobalt Strike is a paid penetration testing product that allows an attacker to deploy an agent named 'Beacon' on the victim machine. Beacon includes a wealth of functionality to the attacker, including, but not limited to command execution, key logging, file transfer, SOCKS proxying, privilege escalation, mimikatz, port scanning and lateral movement. Beacon is in-memory/file-less, in that it consists of stageless or multi-stage shellcode that once loaded by exploiting a vulnerability or executing a shellcode loader, will reflectively load itself into the memory of a process without touching the disk. It supports C2 and staging over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, SMB named pipes as well as forward and reverse TCP; Beacons can be daisy-chained. Cobalt Strike comes with a toolkit for developing shellcode loaders, called Artifact Kit.
The Beacon implant has become popular amongst targeted attackers and criminal users as it is well written, stable, and highly customizable.
Threat Analysis
Cobalt Strike is a malware family tracked by threat intelligence researchers and catalogued in the Malpedia dataset. It represents a distinct malicious software lineage with identifiable code characteristics, behaviors, and victimology.