Earlier last year, I had a frantic call from a customer. They needed to make a small change to Beacon’s communication pattern and quickly. This customer was asked to spend a week with a network defense team and train them on different attacker tactics. Each day, my customer had to show the network defense team all of their indicators and walk them through each of their activities. After a few days, this network defense team was able to zero in on Cobalt Strike’s Beacon and they were having trouble conducting other types of training activity because of this.

A blue training audience gets the most benefit from a red team’s activity when the red team shares their indicators, tactics, and knowledge with them. Clear indicator information allows the blue team to look at their sensors and see what they missed when they tried to put the story together. An open discussion of favored tactics (e.g., ways to do lateral movement, techniques like the Golden Ticket, etc.) allows a blue team to address major gaps in their defenses.

For red teams, openness comes at a cost. Tools and capabilities are expensive to buy or time-consuming to build. A red team’s effectiveness comes down to skilled operators and tools that give them freedom to work in a network. You need both. A poor operator will misuse a good tool. Depending on the maturity of the training audience and environment, a skilled operator may find themselves completely unable to operate without good tools to support them.

When a red team gives up all of their operating information, they’ve given their training audiences a gift-wrapped roadmap to detect their activity now and into the future. It’s a lot harder to play the role of an unknown adversary when your tools are well understood by the training audience.

To deal with this problem, most red teams choose to keep information about their tools and tactics close hold. They’re relying on a strategy of obscurity to protect their investment and to extend the productive life of their current technologies. This is at direct odds with what a red team should offer.

I think about this problem a lot. I sell a public solution that allows red teams to operate. I do not have the luxury of obscurity. I also don’t want obscurity. I want the training audiences I work with to get the most benefit possible from the red team activity my customers and I conduct. This means my customers need to feel safe disclosing details about their operations and their use of my tools.

I’ve made some headway on this problem and it’s one of the things in Cobalt Strike I’m most proud of.

On-disk, Cobalt Strike has its Artifact Kit. This is my source code framework to build all of Cobalt Strike’s executables and DLLs. My customers get the source code to this framework and they have the freedom to change this process and introduce other techniques to evade anti-virus. Cobalt Strike also plays nice with the Veil Evasion Framework. It’s trivial to export one of Cobalt Strike’s proprietary stagers in a Veil-friendly format too.

Network indicators are another story. Once a blue team understands what your tool looks like on the wire, it’s generally game over for that capability. Cobalt Strike has a good handle on this problem too. Malleable C2 lets Cobalt Strike’s end-users change Cobalt Strike’s indicators on the wire.

Specifically:

You get to transform and define where in a POST and GET transaction Beacon stores its metadata, output, and tasks. If you want to base64 encode an encrypted task and wrap it in HTML you’re welcome to do that. If you want to stick your encrypted tasks in the middle of an image, this is trivial to do too.

You get to dress up your transaction with extra indicators. You can add whichever client and server headers you want to HTTP POST and GET transactions. You can add arbitrary parameters to your GET and POST requests. You also get to define the URLs used for each of these.

These two pieces combined together give you a lot of control over what Cobalt Strike’s Beacon looks like on the wire. If you want, you can look like known malware. Or, you can blend in with existing traffic. Or, do something in between to adjust your activity to what your training audience is ready for.

Now, what about that customer? Sadly, Malleable C2 didn’t exist at the time of that call. We were able to figure out a one-off work-around for their situation. Today it’s a different story. Between Artifact Kit and Malleable C2, it’s quite feasible to make Cobalt Strike look like a new actor. You can do this on a weekly or even daily basis, if you need to. This flexibility is a big step towards resolving the openness versus future effectiveness conflict.