Recently, I’ve had multiple people ask about port forwards with Cobalt Strike’s Beacon payload. Beacon has had SOCKS proxy pivoting support since June 2013. This feature opens a SOCKS proxy server on the team server. Each SOCKS server instance is associated with an individual Beacon. All requests and traffic sent to a Cobalt Strike SOCKS server are sent to the Beacon to take action on.

SOCKS pivoting is a no-brainer with a SOCKS aware application, such as a web browser. Simply point the application at your Cobalt Strike team server, put in the right port, and away you go.

SOCKS pivoting is also easy on Linux, thanks to the magic of proxychains. The proxychains program will run a program, intercept outbound network connections from that program, and force the connection through the SOCKS proxy set in a global configuration file (/etc/proxychains.conf).

These options work well in many cases, but they do not cover all cases. What happens if you need to tunnel the Windows RDP client through the Beacon payload? How about interacting with a target network share from a red Windows asset tunneled over Cobalt Strike’s Beacon payload?

One way to meet the above needs is to use a commercial tool, like ProxyCap, to make your Windows system proxy aware. [Thanks Meatballs, for the tip on this one]. This will allow you to force Windows tools and clients through the Beacon payload.

Another option is to create a port forward on your team server that reaches the target host and port through your Beacon. There’s one problem here. Beacon does not have a port forward command [it does have reverse port forwards]. I may add this in the future, but it’s not a big omission. You can use socat to create a port forward that goes through a SOCKS proxy. Here’s the syntax to do this:

 socat TCP4-LISTEN:<listen port>,fork SOCKS4:<team server host>:<target>:<target port>,socksport=<socks port>

Let’s say you want to port forward 3389 on your team server in red space to 192.168.1.100:3389 in blue space. Let’s assume the Beacon SOCKS proxy lives on port 9999. Here’s the syntax to do this:

 socat TCP4-LISTEN:3389,fork SOCKS4:127.0.0.1:192.168.1.100:3389,socksport=9999

And, that’s how you turn a SOCKS proxy server into a port forward. This works equally well with the SOCKS pivoting available over SSH. In fact, Advanced Threat Tactics, part 7 – Pivoting, covers the topics in this post. If you liked this post, I recommend that you check out that lecture. [The whole course is chock-full of other goodness too]