Cobalt Strike Command and Control Beacon

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Cobalt Strike is a threat emulation platform commonly modified and used by adversaries to conduct network attack and exploitation campaigns. This rule detects a network activity algorithm leveraged by Cobalt Strike implant beacons for command and control.

Rule type: query

Rule indices:

  • auditbeat-*
  • filebeat-*
  • packetbeat-*
  • logs-endpoint.events.*

Severity: high

Risk score: 73

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Network
  • Threat Detection
  • Command and Control
  • Host

Version: 6 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.10.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.14.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positives

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This rule should be tailored to either exclude systems, as sources or destinations, in which this behavior is expected.

Investigation guide

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Threat intel

This activity has been observed in FIN7 campaigns.

Rule query

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event.category:(network OR network_traffic) AND type:(tls OR http) AND
network.transport:tcp AND
destination.domain:/[a-z]{3}.stage.[0-9]{8}\..*/

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

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Version 6 (7.14.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    event.category:(network OR network_traffic) AND type:(tls OR http) AND
    network.transport:tcp AND
    destination.domain:/[a-z]{3}.stage.[0-9]{8}\..*/
Version 5 (7.13.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 4 (7.12.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 3 (7.11.2 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (7.11.0 release)
  • Formatting only