
This means that live Beacons cannot communicate to their C2 until the operators restart the server. This would allow an attacker to cause memory exhaustion in the Cobalt Strike server (the “Teamserver”) making the server unresponsive until it’s restarted. The bug works by sending a server fake replies that “squeeze every bit of available memory from the C2’s web server thread,” SentinelOne researcher Gal Kristal wrote in a post. Researchers at security firm SentinelOne recently found a critical bug in the Team Server that makes it easy to knock the server offline. The client then responds with a “reply.” Feeling the squeeze Chief among the communications are “tasks” servers send to instruct clients to run a command, get a process list, or do other things. The link connecting the client to the server is called the web server thread, which handles communication between the two machines. From then on, the client will use those customizations to maintain persistent contact with the machine running the Team Server. Then the attacker installs the client on a targeted machine after exploiting a vulnerability, tricking the user or gaining access by other means. An attacker starts by spinning up a machine running Team Server that has been configured to use specific “malleability” customizations, such as how often the client is to report to the server or specific data to periodically send. The main components of the security tool are the Cobalt Strike client-also known as a Beacon-and the Cobalt Strike team server, which sends commands to infected computers and receives the data they exfiltrate.

#The riftbreaker cobalt software
For both defender and attacker, Cobalt Strike provides a soup-to-nuts collection of software packages that allow infected computers and attacker servers to interact in highly customizable ways. Over the past few years, malicious hackers-working on behalf of a nation-state or in search of profit-have increasingly embraced the software.

Governments, vigilantes, and criminal hackers have a new way to disrupt botnets running the widely used attack software Cobalt Strike, courtesy of research published on Wednesday.Ĭobalt Strike is a legitimate security tool used by penetration testers to emulate malicious activity in a network.
