It’s hard to believe we’re at the end of 2015 and on to 2016. I’ve now had a product on the market for three and a half years. That’s like 27 dog years! It’s a long time for a hacking tool too. 2015 was an exciting year here. Our industry is changing and Cobalt Strike has made changes to keep pace with it.
This year, I pushed five major releases of Cobalt Strike. Here are some of the highlights:
The April 2015 release of Cobalt Strike re-architected Beacon to support post-exploitation jobs. A job is a feature that injects into another process and delivers its results to your Beacon. This allows Beacon to stay, safe and sound, in one process and gather post-exploitation data from another. Beacon’s keystroke logger, screenshot tool, and other features use this mechanism. This release also added native mimikatz and hashdump to Beacon as well.
Cobalt Strike’s July 2015 release took the SMB Beacon to a new level. The SMB Beacon uses a named pipe to receive commands from and relay output through another Beacon. Great feature, but it always had one problem: it didn’t fit into any workflows. This release added a named pipe stager to deliver the SMB Beacon with a lateral movement attack. This release also added lateral movement automation to Beacon. Finally, this release allowed Beacon features to target an SMB Beacon listener for privilege escalation. This is pretty significant when you think about it. If you’re an external actor, it’s not trivial to get a SYSTEM-level session to egress. These changes solve this problem. You simply chain that new SYSTEM-level session through another session that can already get out. This July release also added reverse port forwards to Beacon too. Overall, this release generated more “holy crap!” emails from customers than any other release in the past.
September 2015 saw the introduction of Cobalt Strike 3.0. This release was the pinnacle of this year’s efforts. Cobalt Strike 3.0 was a ground-up rewrite of the Cobalt Strike team server and client without dependence on the Metasploit Framework.
I opted to go in this direction after Cobalt Strike 2.1. This was the release where PowerShell became easy to use through Beacon. After 2.1, it was possible [and in some cases desirable] to operate entirely through Beacon. Much of my post-2.1 work with Cobalt Strike added to Beacon’s feature set. The 3.0 release changed Cobalt Strike’s user interface to expose Beacon’s features and build workflows on top of it. The 3.0 release also overhauled logging and re-imagined the reporting features for the red team problem set. It also introduced a workflow for user exploitation at scale.
And then there’s the Advanced Threat Tactics course. This course came out in September 2015 with Cobalt Strike’s 3.0 release. I was really happy with 2013’s Tradecraft course. At the time it came out, it was the best material I had. Cobalt Strike 3.0 was a big change and with that change had to come a new course. The Advanced Threat Tactics covers a full end-to-end process for targeted phishing, post-exploitation, privilege escalation, reconnaissance, lateral movement, pivoting, and evasion. This course is nearly six hours of material.
2015 was the year Cobalt Strike became an offensive platform in its own right. This didn’t happen a moment too soon. Large companies and government entities are either standing up red teams or reinventing the red teams they have. Forward leaning consulting firms are building services to help customers understand how their full security program stands up to realistic attacks. These evolved teams have needs that are different from those that drove vulnerability assessment and penetration testing tools for the past 10+ years. Cobalt Strike’s 2015 releases were laser focused on these needs and where these teams are going with their offensive efforts into 2016 and beyond. Pretty exciting.