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The compromises were discovered in December 2020. After that broad-brush attack, the threat actors (believed to have links to Russia) selected specific targets to further infiltrate, which they did over the course of several months.
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government agencies, tech companies such as Microsoft and FireEye, and many others, began with a poisoned software update that delivered the Sunburst backdoor to around 18,000 organizations in spring 2020. The SolarWinds espionage attack, which affected several U.S. Researchers identified Raindrop – a backdoor loader that drops Cobalt Strike in order to perform lateral movement across victims’ networks – as one of the tools used for follow-on attacks. In January, researchers unmasked a piece of SolarWinds-related malware, dubbed Raindrop, used in targeted attacks after the effort’s initial mass Sunburst compromise. “Based on our data, Proofpoint assesses with high confidence that Cobalt Strike is becoming increasingly popular among threat actors as an initial access payload, not just a second-stage tool threat actors use once access is achieved, with criminal threat actors making up the bulk of attributed Cobalt Strike campaigns in 2020,” the researchers wrote Cobalt Strike’s Role in SolarWindsĬobalt Strike Beacon was one of the many tools in the vast malware arsenal used in the sprawling SolarWinds supply-chain attacks. In fact, “the bulk” of Cobalt Strike campaigns in 2020 were pulled off by criminal threat actors, they said.Īccording to the report, when mapped to the MITRE Att&CK framework, Proofpoint has seen Cobalt Strike appear in attack chains during Initial Access, Execution and Persistence. When it comes to how threat actors are attempting to compromise hosts, Cobalt Strike is increasingly being used as an initial access payload, as opposed to being a second-stage tool that’s used after attackers have gained access, Proofpoint researchers found.
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Two months after that leak, in January 2021, researchers at Recorded Future documented a spike in the use of cracked or trial versions of Cobalt Strike, largely by notable APT groups including APT41, Mustang Panda, Ocean Lotus and FIN7.
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Proofpoint isn’t the only security outfit that’s spotted rampant growth in the subversion of Cobalt Strike into an attack tool: an evolution that’s increased following the tool’s source code having leaked from GitHub in November 2020.
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But threat actors have figured out how to turn it against networks to exfiltrate data, deliver malware and create fake command-and-control (C2) profiles that look legit and slip past detection.
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When used as intended, it simulates an attack. That 161 percent increase happened between 20, but the crooks haven’t lost their taste for Cobalt Strike in 2021: It’s still a “high-volume threat,” researchers said.Ĭobalt Strike sends out beacons to detect network vulnerabilities. They’ve witnessed the tool being used to target tens of thousands of organizations, wielded by more cybercriminals and general-commodity malware operators than by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors or by those operators who prefer general commodity malware, the researchers said in a report published on Tuesday. The researchers have tracked a year-over-year increase of 161 percent in the number of real-world attacks where Cobalt Strike has shown up. The use of Cobalt Strike – the legitimate, commercially available tool used by network penetration testers – by cybercrooks has shot through the roof, according to Proofpoint researchers, who say that the tool has now “gone fully mainstream in the crimeware world.”
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