Cobalt Strike is a commercial, full-featured, remote access tool that bills itself as “adversary simulation software designed to execute targeted attacks and emulate the post-exploitation actions of advanced threat actors”. Cobalt Strike’s interactive post-exploit capabilities cover the full range of ATT&CK tactics, all executed within a single, integrated system.[1]
In addition to its own capabilities, Cobalt Strike leverages the capabilities of other well-known tools such as Metasploit and Mimikatz.[2]
73
TechniquesTop 1%
12
TacticsTop 1%
30
Threat groupsunranked
6
Campaignsunranked
Enterprise ATT&CK only. Any Mobile or ICS rows on the same ATT&CK page are not carried.
Cobalt Strike can leverage the HTTP protocol for C2 communication, while hiding the actual data in either an HTTP header, URI parameter, the transaction body, or appending it to the URI.3Cobalt Strike has also added Host: ocsp.verisign.com to HTTP headers to mimic Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) traffic.4
Cobalt Strike can query <code>HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\<Excel Version>\Excel\Security\AccessVBOM\</code> to determine if the security setting for restricting default programmatic access is enabled.1011
Discovery27 detection rules
Standing S0154
Reach is how much of ATT&CK this malware 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 825 ATT&CK software entries 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
Techniques73Top 1%
100th percentile · None of the 825 ATT&CK software entries has more Enterprise techniques — the highest in the population.
Tactics12Top 1%
100th percentile · None of the 825 ATT&CK software entries has more tactics spanned — the highest in the population.
Threat groups3061% tie · 22 values
61% of the population shares a single value across only 22 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Campaigns685% tie · 8 values
85% of the population shares a single value across only 8 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Coverage
Rules / technique20med47th pct
47th percentile · 53% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more detection rules per technique.
Tests / technique5med42nd pct
42nd percentile · 58% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have more atomic tests per technique.
Data comps / technique4med54% tie · 11 values
54% of the population shares a single value across only 11 distinct values, so a percentile here would rank the tie, not the entity.
Mitigations / technique2medTop 9%
91st percentile · 91% of 825 ATT&CK software entries have this many mitigations per technique or fewer.
5 of 8 axes carry an honest rank on this page. Coverage medians are taken across this malware’s 73 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.