Menace Unleashed: Excel File Deploys Cobalt Strike at Ukraine | Fortinet Blog
FortiGuard Labs has recently identified a sophisticated cyberattack involving an Excel file embedded with a VBA macro designed to deploy a DLL file. Learn more.
Making Cobalt Strike harder for threat actors to abuse
Cobalt Strike, the popular tool used by red teams to test the resilience of their cyber defenses, has seen many iterations and improvements over the last decade. First released in 2012, it was originally the commercial spinoff of the open-source Armitage project that added a graphical user interface (GUI) to the Metasploit framework to help security practitioners detect software vulnerabilities more quickly.
Analysis of a Remote Code Execution (RCE) Vulnerability in Cobalt Strike 4.7.1
Command & Control (C2) frameworks are a very sensitive component of Red Team operations. Often, a Red Team will be in a highly privileged position on a target’s network, and a compromise of the C2 framework could lead to a compromise of both the red team operator’s system and control over beacons established on a target’s systems. As such, vulnerabilities in C2 frameworks are high priority targets for threat actors and Counterintelligence (CI) operations. On September 20, 2022, HelpSystems published an out-of-band patch for Cobalt Strike which stated that there was potential for Remote Code Execution (RCE).
Making Cobalt Strike harder for threat actors to abuse
Cobalt Strike, the popular tool used by red teams to test the resilience of their cyber defenses, has seen many iterations and improvements over the last decade. First released in 2012, it was originally the commercial spinoff of the open-source Armitage project that added a graphical user interface (GUI) to the Metasploit framework to help security practitioners detect software vulnerabilities more quickly.
Analysis of a Remote Code Execution (RCE) Vulnerability in Cobalt Strike 4.7.1
Command & Control (C2) frameworks are a very sensitive component of Red Team operations. Often, a Red Team will be in a highly privileged position on a target’s network, and a compromise of the C2 framework could lead to a compromise of both the red team operator’s system and control over beacons established on a target’s systems. As such, vulnerabilities in C2 frameworks are high priority targets for threat actors and Counterintelligence (CI) operations. On September 20, 2022, HelpSystems published an out-of-band patch for Cobalt Strike which stated that there was potential for Remote Code Execution (RCE).