Cobalt Strike 4.6 is now available. This isn’t a consistent release, as it mostly focuses on security updates. There are also a couple of useful updates for users. A major release is planned for this summer, so this release lays the groundwork for the changes that are coming at that point.
- Security Updates
This is the main focus of the Cobalt Strike 4.6 release. Product security is nothing new, we do our due diligence when it comes to screening potential customers and working with law enforcement. I think it is worth pointing out that the processes described by Raphael in that blog post are still processes that are followed at HelpSystems today–specifically: “From time to time, we receive informal requests for technical assistance or records from private entities. Our policy is not to perform analysis for, provide deconfliction services to, or disclose our records to private entities upon informal request.
If we have information relevant to a law enforcement investigation, we comply with valid legal process. This stance is to avoid frivolous requests and to protect our customer’s information.We also investigate tips. We can’t usually share information back, but we look into things brought to our attention.” We are also proactive when it comes to searching for Cobalt Strike teamservers out in the wild. This work is carried out by our own, dedicated threat intelligence team and it helps us to improve our product controls. That team also issues takedown requests if cracked copies are found.
- Arsenal Kit
We have combined the individual kits in the Cobalt Strike arsenal into a single kit, appropriately known as the Arsenal Kit. Building this kit yields a single aggressor script that can be loaded instead of loading all of the separate kits individually. The kit is controlled by the arsenal_kit_config file which is used to configure the kits that are built with the build_arsenal_kit.sh script. The Arsenal Kit can be downloaded by licensed users from the Cobalt Strike arsenal.
Over the past few releases, we have made enhancements to Cobalt Strike’s product security. We intentionally haven’t described product security changes in much detail, but we do take it very seriously.
- Execute-assembly 1MB Limit Increase
A number of users have been asking for this for quite some time, and the change that we made affect not only execute-assembly, but other tasks (eg. dllinject) as well. We have added three new settings to the Malleable C2 profile (tasks_max_size, tasks_proxy_max_size and tasks_dns_proxy_max_size) that can be used to control maximum size limits. Note that these settings need to be set prior to team server startup. If the size is increased at a later time, old artifacts will still use the previous size settings and tasks that are too large will be rejected.
The 4.5 release in December 2021 saw changes to product licensing and improvements on the watermarking in the software. Those changes made it significantly more difficult to tamper with the authorization ID and locate the ever-changing hidden watermarks, therefore making it easier for us to trace stolen copies of Cobalt Strike back to specific customers. We have yet to see any credible reports of cracked copies of the 4.5 release being used because of these changes. We have seen what are claimed to be cracked copies of 4.5 being sold, but those have all turned out to be older versions badged as 4.5. By design, if the watermarks in the 4.5 release are tampered with, it will simply no longer work.
The 4.6 release brings a change to how the teamserver is deployed. Rather than a Java .jar archive, the teamserver has been built as a native binary. The client is still shipped as a .jar archive but we also plan to change that at some point as well. You shouldn’t notice anything different about the update process itself, but it is important to note that “cobaltstrike.jar” is now just a container for the team server (“TeamServerImage”) and client (“cobaltstrike-client.jar”), both of which will automatically be extracted during the update process. One thing to bear in mind though is that due to the changes in how Cobalt Strike 4.6 is installed and how it runs, coupled with changes to the download infrastructure to facilitate those changes, any scripts that you might have to automate the update process will likely no longer work and will need to be changed.
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