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DETECTION OVERVIEW

Cobalt Strike C&C HTTP Connection

Risk Factors

Cobalt Strike is associated with pen testing, security assessments, and sometimes persistent, planned attacks. Malleable C&C profiles for configuring C&C traffic are publicly available and well known. Through a persistent C&C channel, an attacker can remotely control a device and gain an entry point for further attacks on the network.

Kill Chain

Command-and-Control

Risk Score

60

Detection diagram
Next in Command-and-Control: Cobalt Strike C&C TLS Connection

Attack Background

Cobalt Strike is an attack toolkit that is often associated with malicious activity. The Cobalt Strike Malleable C&C component enables an attacker to disguise C&C communications as legitimate traffic from the Cobalt Strike Beacon agent, which is installed on the victim device. The disguised C&C communications are configured with a Malleable C&C profile. The profile is a domain-specific language file that specifies both the HTTP request and response indicators and how to encode data. For example, the victim sends an HTTP GET request to the attacker with encrypted metadata. The C&C server responds with a task such as "sleep" or "run command". Based on the profile specifications, the command output is then encrypted within another request, such as an HTTP POST request.

Mitigation Options

Quarantine the device while checking for the presence of malware

Monitor and investigate unusual network activity for lateral movement or data exfiltration

MITRE ATT&CK ID

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