Rewterz Threat Alert – Cobalt Strike Malware – Active IOCs

September 7, 2022

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

bfd1dfbbb8efde4ca7e131a97fba92a8
905139a05673c8aa11f8fe22dc2a3694

SHA-256

6a45a218d2d7a5bb8e5d6dd2e36b6399b97a8ddd15be490d2d5c95266fdf06e1
ec829e146c3955eaa66a9a5f318c4d359b0605f5d1679790aeaf0c2503b118fe

SHA-1

a79c2d0739bbea4cb7ac7a7fa15b0a15e1f97ad3
fe926dc0b95d25a36b20cd51370d312e913d2252

Remediation

Block the threat indicators at their respective controls.
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