
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. When a red teamer or an adversary executes a command within a Beacon session, the operating system will generate an EID 400 event log (PowerShell Engine Startup) on the system that the command is executed on. 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. The powershell Beacon command executes commands written in PowerShell within the Cobalt Strike framework. 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.

#Customize cobalt strike beacon windows 10#
In this quick blogpost, I will share the steps that I completed to simulate Cobalt Strike beacon activity using APTSimulator in a Windows 10 virtual machine. 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. Simulating Cobalt Strike Beacon Activity. 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. Red teams and penetration testers use Cobalt Strike to demonstrate the risk of a breach and evaluate mature security programs. Its speed, flexibility, and advanced features are likely contributing factors as to why ransomware attacks have been ticking upward in recent years. Cobalt Strike is threat emulation software.

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.
