Cobalt Strike Insights

What is Cobalt Strike?

Cobalt Strike is a commercial, full-featured penetration testing platform marketed towards red teams. It allows an attacker to deploy agents on victim machines to simulate advanced threats, conduct network reconnaissance, execute code, and steal credentials. It is often used post-exploitation to move laterally within a network and establish persistent access. Due to its versatility and effectiveness, it is also popular among malicious actors, including ransomware groups and APTs.

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What other technologies are related to Cobalt Strike?

Cobalt Strike Competitor Technologies

Metasploit

Metasploit is a penetration testing framework that provides similar capabilities to Cobalt Strike, such as exploit execution and post-exploitation modules.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 17% (2.1k) of relevant job posts

Empire

Empire is a post-exploitation framework, built on PowerShell, that offers similar capabilities for maintaining access and lateral movement within a compromised network.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 67% (335) of relevant job posts

Sliver

Sliver is a Go-based cross-platform adversary simulation/red team framework, offering similar functionalities to Cobalt Strike for command and control.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 90% (208) of relevant job posts

Mythic

Mythic is a collaborative, multi-platform, red teaming framework focused on providing a customizable command and control environment. It is a direct competitor.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 92% (199) of relevant job posts

Covenant

Covenant is a .NET command and control framework designed to be a collaborative red team platform. It is a direct competitor to Cobalt Strike.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 87% (171) of relevant job posts

PowerShell Empire

PowerShell Empire (often referred to as Empire) is a post-exploitation framework, built on PowerShell, that offers similar capabilities for maintaining access and lateral movement within a compromised network. It is a direct competitor.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 64% (152) of relevant job posts

Brute Ratel

Brute Ratel C4 is a Command and Control Center that automates most penetration testing or red teaming tasks. It is a direct competitor.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 94% (68) of relevant job posts

Havoc

Havoc is a modern and flexible Red Team C2 framework. It is a direct competitor.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 96% (67) of relevant job posts

Cobalt Strike Complementary Technologies

Bloodhound

BloodHound is an Active Directory reconnaissance tool that helps identify attack paths. Cobalt Strike can utilize these paths for lateral movement, making it a complementary tool.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 48% (435) of relevant job posts

PowerSploit

PowerSploit is a collection of PowerShell modules that can be used for various post-exploitation tasks. Cobalt Strike can leverage PowerSploit modules through its Beacon payload.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 86% (196) of relevant job posts

Mimikatz

Mimikatz is a tool for extracting passwords and other credentials from memory. Cobalt Strike often uses Mimikatz for credential harvesting during post-exploitation.

mentioned alongside Cobalt Strike in 53% (272) of relevant job posts