Cobalt Group · GOLD KINGSWOOD · Cobalt Gang · Cobalt Spider
Cobalt Group is a financially motivated threat group that has primarily targeted financial institutions since at least 2016. The group has conducted intrusions to steal money via targeting ATM systems, card processing, payment systems and SWIFT systems. Cobalt Group has mainly targeted banks in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. One of the alleged leaders was arrested in Spain in early 2018, but the group still appears to be active. The group has been known to target organizations in order to use their access to then compromise additional victims.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Reporting indicates there may be links between Cobalt Group and both the malware Carbanak and the group Carbanak.[8]
34
Techniques70th pct
9
Tactics52nd pct
6
Tools & malware67th pct
0
CampaignsNone recorded
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
Cobalt Group has injected code into trusted processes.17
Privilege Escalation · Stealth69 detection rules
Standing G0080
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this group touches. Coverage is how well defended each thing it does is, as a median per technique rather than a total — a total would just restate the reach. Each figure is ranked against all 176 ATT&CK groups only where that population actually spreads. Where most of the population shares one value, a percentile would rank the tie instead of the entity, so the raw value is shown and no rank is claimed.
Reach
Techniques3470th pct
70th percentile · 70% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many Enterprise techniques or fewer.
Tactics952nd pct
52nd percentile · 52% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many tactics spanned or fewer.
Tools & malware667th pct
67th percentile · 67% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many tools and malware or fewer.
Campaigns089% tie · 4 values
89% of the population shares a single value across only 4 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique33medTop 19%
81st percentile · 81% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many detection rules per technique or fewer.
Tests / technique4med66th pct
66th percentile · 66% of 176 ATT&CK groups have this many atomic tests per technique or fewer.
Data comps / technique4med65% tie · 12 values
65% of the population shares a single value across only 12 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique2med43% tie · 11 values
43% of the population shares a single value across only 11 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
5 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this group’s 34 Enterprise techniques.
Range
Technique Campaign use over its cumulative rule count.
Florian Roth (Nextron Systems), Tom Ueltschi, Jonhnathan Ribeiro, oscd.community
2017-11-10
2022-12-02
0bcfabcb-7929-47f4-93d6-b33fb67d34d1
Splunk
The following analytic detects suspicious modifications to firewall rule registry settings that allow inbound traffic on specific ports with a public profile. (...)
Detects the suspicious file that is created from PoC code against Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-34527 (PrinterNightmare), CVE-2021-1675 .
Detects when AppLocker "Audit only" enforcement mode reports that an Application, DLL, Script, MSI, or Packaged-App would have been blocked if AppLocker "Enforce rules" enforcement mode was enabled.
This search surfaces AWS Bedrock Claude prompts containing phrases commonly associated with prompt injection or jailbreak attempts, such as instruction overrides, persona switching, or requests to ignore prior guidance. (...)
This detection identifies sensitive data such as social security numbers, passwords, API keys, and credit card numbers being sent in prompts to AWS Bedrock Claude models. (...)
This detection identifies unusually large prompts sent to AWS Bedrock Claude models by calculating the statistical baseline of input token counts and flagging requests that exceed one standard deviations above the mean. (...)
Detects the Linux-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency by Axios NPM package, including payload download via curl and detached execution using nohup and python3. (...)
Detects the macOS-specific execution chain of the plain-crypto-js malicious npm dependency in Axios NPM Package, including AppleScript execution via osascript, payload download, permission modification, execution, and cleanup.
The following analytic detects the creation of a batch file (.bat) within the Windows system directory tree, specifically in the System32 or SysWOW64 folders. (...)