Rewterz Threat Alert – Cobalt Strike Malware – Active IOCs

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

Filename

• Shellzi2[.]xls

MD5

• 6bc1e4c0b530d77eecab3dbe5b612976
• 513cf6eccb0d244d49d75cfc3c0e8bc8

SHA-256

• efaab25f4c6217e6635ae39afc55b4a159d6ba574134781264357f29c4067f55
• a08c334b4787086ae997c05f7077e4c6955fd5cc8a141e58d1534fe0683fc44f

SHA-1

34da4d4c00b9a3436f856e66e67644d480a64221
947c26ca2c3ace7a8a1e013469d18c00f81ddc78

Remediation

• Block all threat indicators at your respective controls.
• Search for IOCs in your environment.