CobaltStrike

CobaltStrike is a paid penetration testing product that allows an attacker to deploy an agent named ‘Beacon’ on the victim machine. The beacon includes a wealth of functionality to the attacker, including, but not limited to command execution, keylogging, file transfer, SOCKS proxying, privilege escalation, mimikatz, port scanning, and lateral movement. Beacon is in-memory/file-less, in that it consists of stageless or multi-stage shellcode that once loaded by exploiting a vulnerability or executing a shellcode loader, will reflectively load itself into the memory of a process without touching the disk. It supports C2 and staging over HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, SMB named pipes as well as forward and reverse TCP; Beacons can be daisy-chained. CobaltStrike comes with a toolkit for developing shellcode loaders, called Artifact Kit.

The Beacon implant has become popular amongst targeted attackers and criminal users as it is well written, stable, and highly customizable.