Cobalt Strike Analysis and Tutorial: How Malleable C2 Profiles Make Cobalt Strike Difficult to Detect
Summary: Unit 42 analyzed how Cobalt Strike's Beacon uses Malleable C2 profiles to shape its HTTP traffic, contrasting the default profile's fixed GET and POST URIs with a custom profile that prepended both with /MicrosoftUpdate to mimic Windows update requests. The researchers examined two in-the-wild samples with no VirusTotal triggers at publication, identified through static and dynamic analysis, and decoded their Beacon configurations with Didier Stevens's 1768.py script.
Key Takeaway: Signatures written against the default profile's /load and /submit.php URIs will not catch traffic from a customized profile, and both samples the researchers examined were undetected on VirusTotal at the time of writing.
Read the original at Unit 42 Palo Alto Networks ↗
- Topics
- Zero-Days & Exploits
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