Cobalt Strike 3.4 introduced a Kill Date feature. This is a date that Cobalt Strike embeds into each Beacon stage. If a Beacon artifact is run on or after this date, it immediately exits. If a running Beacon wakes up on or after this date, it immediately exits. I don’t see kill dates as a replacement for tracking artifacts and cleaning up after an engagement. I see them as an extra piece of assurance.

To use Cobalt Strike’s kill date feature, you must specify a kill date when you start the team server. Here’s the help for the teamserver script:

Here’s an example of starting a team server with a kill date embedded in it:

You’ll notice that it is mandatory to specify a Malleable C2 profile, if you want to take advantage of kill dates. I’ve had a few folks ask if there is a way around this. The answer is no, not right now. The default profile isn’t anything special. It looks like a simple piece of malware on the wire. Specify a profile. 🙂 You’re better off for it.

I want to call your attention to one detail though. Notice that the team server acknowledges both the profile and the kill date. This is Cobalt Strike telling you that it sees these parameters and it’s using them as you asked it to.

If you do not see this acknowledgement, Cobalt Strike is not using your custom profile, and it does not have a kill date embedded into the Beacon stage.

You may wonder, how is this situation possible? If you specify the parameters correctly, why wouldn’t Cobalt Strike use them? This is a good question and it’s the real reason for this blog post.

Cobalt Strike 3.0 and 3.1 shipped with a teamserver script that passed either two or three arguments to the Cobalt Strike software. The teamserver script shipped with these versions of Cobalt Strike would not pass an arbitrary number of arguments. The update program that ships with Cobalt Strike does not update the teamserver script.

If you have a teamserver script from Cobalt Strike 3.0 or 3.1, Cobalt Strike will not use the kill date you specify or the profile you specify when a kill date is present. If this applies to you: download the trial for the latest Cobalt Strike Linux package, update it to the licensed version with the built-in update program, and you’re set again.

The teamserver script with Cobalt Strike 3.2 and later will work fine.