In a recent cyber campaign, the Chinese state-sponsored threat group TAG-112 compromised two Tibetan websites, Tibet Post and Gyudmed Tantric University, to deliver the Cobalt Strike malware. Recorded Future’s Insikt Group discovered that the attackers embedded malicious JavaScript in these sites, which spoofed a TLS certificate error to trick visitors into downloading a disguised security certificate. This malware, often used by threat actors for remote access and post-exploitation, highlights a continued cyber-espionage focus on Tibetan entities. TAG-112’s infrastructure, concealed using Cloudflare, links this campaign to other China-sponsored operations, particularly TAG-102 (Evasive Panda).

Abuse by cybercriminals Cobalt Strike is a popular commercial tool provided by the cybersecurity software company Fortra. It is designed to help legitimate IT security experts perform attack simulations that identify weaknesses in security operations and incident responses. In the wrong hands, however, unlicensed copies of Cobalt Strike can provide a malicious actor with a wide range of attack capabilities.Fortra...

Abuse by cybercriminals Cobalt Strike is a popular commercial tool provided by the cybersecurity software company Fortra. It is designed to help legitimate IT security experts perform attack simulations that identify weaknesses in security operations and incident responses. In the wrong hands, however, unlicensed copies of Cobalt Strike can provide a malicious actor with a wide range of attack capabilities.Fortra...

We examine malicious Cobalt Strike case studies with distinct techniques using Malleable C2 profiles.

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), cybersecurity software company Fortra™ and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) are taking technical and legal action to disrupt cracked, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike and abused Microsoft software, which have been used by cybercriminals to distribute malware, including ransomware. This is a change in the way DCU has...

• Initially observed in July 2016, TrickGate is a shellcode-based packer offered as a service to hide malware from EDRs and antivirus programs.
• Over the last 6 years, TrickGate was used to deploy the top members of the “Most Wanted Malware” list, such as Cerber, Trickbot, Maze, Emotet, REvil, Cobalt Strike, AZORult, Formbook, AgentTesla and more.
• TrickGate managed to stay under the radar for years because it is transformative – it undergoes changes periodically. This characteristic caused the research community to identify it by numerous attributes and names.
• While the packer’s wrapper changed over time, the main building blocks within TrickGate shellcode are still in use today.
• Check Point Threat Emulation successfully detects and blocks the TrickGate packer.

Unit 42 researchers examine several malware samples that incorporate Cobalt Strike components, and discuss some of the ways that we catch these samples by analyzing artifacts from the deltas in process memory at key points of execution. We will also discuss the evasion tactics used by these threats, and other issues that make their analysis problematic.

Cybereason GSOC observed distribution of the Bumblebee Loader and post-exploitation activities including privilege escalation, reconnaissance and credential theft. Bumblebee operators use the Cobalt Strike framework throughout the attack and abuse credentials for privilege escalation to access Active Directory, as well as abusing a domain administrator account to move laterally, create local user accounts and exfiltrate data...

• Cisco Talos recently discovered a new attack framework called "Manjusaka" being used in the wild that has the potential to become prevalent across the threat landscape. This framework is advertised as an imitation of the Cobalt Strike framework.
• The implants for the new malware family are written in the Rust language for Windows and Linux.
• A fully functional version of the command and control (C2), written in GoLang with a User Interface in Simplified Chinese, is freely available and can generate new implants with custom configurations with ease, increasing the likelihood of wider adoption of this framework by malicious actors.
• We recently discovered a campaign in the wild using lure documents themed around COVID-19 and the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province. These maldocs ultimately led to the delivery of Cobalt Strike beacons on infected endpoints.
• We have observed the same threat actor using the Cobalt Strike beacon and implants from the Manjusaka framework.

Unit 42 continuously hunts for new and unique malware samples that match known advanced persistent threat (APT) patterns and tactics. On May 19, one such sample was uploaded to VirusTotal, where it received a benign verdict from all 56 vendors that evaluated it. Beyond the obvious detection concerns, we believe this sample is also significant in terms of its malicious payload, command and control (C2), and packaging.

Attacker targets bugs in a popular web application graphical interface development tool.