Software for Adversary Simulations and Red Team Operations
In The New Normal in Cybersecurity Part 1, we examined three leading trends in the cybersecurity community over the past year. In this installment, we will take a look into the future and make predictions about where the cybersecurity landscape is potentially headed in 2022 and beyond.
The past year has shown organizations that uncertainty and a transformed reality are the new normal in business. While remote work was intended as a temporary response to the global pandemic, it is now considered a regular part of the business environment—fundamentally altering the way companies operate. This means organizations have had to respond in real-time to shift their cybersecurity strategies and keep up with an expanding IT infrastructure, the explosion of IoT devices, and a new wave of threats from more sophisticated attackers.
This post focuses on creating Cobalt Strike Beacon Object Files using the MinGW compiler on Linux. We will discuss several ideas and best practices that will increase the quality of your BOFs.
Flexibility
Compiling to Both Object Files and Executables
While writing a BOF is great, it’s always worth making the code compile to both BOF and EXE.
Cobalt Strike is a standard-setting adversary simulation tool, recognized globally for facilitating red team operations with its signature payload and extensible C2 framework to accurately replicate the tactics of today’s advanced threat actors
Beacon: The Customizable Post-Exploitation Payload
Beacon, Cobalt Strike’s signature payload, models the behavior of advanced adversaries to perform post-exploitation activities. Beacon offers multiple avenues of communication, including:
PRODUCT SUMMARY
Core Impact and Cobalt Strike represent two distinct, yet complementary approaches to security assessment.
Authored by: Ernesto Alvarez, Senior Security Consultant, Security Consulting Services
This article describes techniques used for creating UDP redirectors for protecting Cobalt Strike team servers. This is one of the recommended mechanisms for hiding Cobalt Strike team servers and involves adding different points which a Beacon can contact for instructions when using the HTTP channel.
The global chaos of last year was also seen in the digital world, as cyber attackers were seemingly relentless in their efforts. Such activity underscores the importance of penetration testing to assess and test security vulnerabilities, which allow you to better evaluate risk and be ready to detect, prevent and respond to threats as they happen.