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Cobalt Group, also known as Cobalt, Cobalt Gang, Cobalt Spider, and GOLD KINGSWOOD, is a Russian-linked cybercrime group. The group has used spearphishing emails carrying malicious attachments, including Office documents, RTF files, archives, and disguised executables, to compromise organizational victims. It weaponized CVE-2017-11882 in malicious RTF delivery campaigns and has used Cobalt Strike as a post-compromise tool. Observed tradecraft includes PowerShell-based payload download and execution, execution of JavaScript scriptlets and Regsvr32-mediated scripts, and staging payloads on public file-hosting and code-hosting services for transfer to victim systems. Cobalt Group has established persistence through Windows Scheduled Tasks, Registry Run keys, and Startup-folder execution, including configurations that launch PowerShell to retrieve Cobalt Strike. It has also deleted a DLL dropper to reduce forensic evidence.
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Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
43 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
30 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
25 additional families tracked in Mallory.
9 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 9 of them exploited in the wild.
A Microsoft Word attachment (sepa rules.doc) -- a ThreadKit exploit document that would exploit CVE-2017-8570, CVE-2017-11882, or CVE-2018-0802 -- to execute the embedded CobInt Stage 1 payload.
After the latest update, MWI is now using CVE-2017-0199 to launch an HTML Application (HTA) used for both information collection and payload execution.
A Microsoft Word attachment (sepa rules.doc) -- a ThreadKit exploit document that would exploit CVE-2017-8570, CVE-2017-11882, or CVE-2018-0802 -- to execute the embedded CobInt Stage 1 payload.
Giagone, R., Bermejo, L., and Yarochkin, F. (2017, November 20). Cobalt Strikes Again: Spam Runs Use Macros and CVE-2017-8759 Exploit Against Russian Banks.
The messages contained a Microsoft Word attachment that used a relationship object to download an external VBscript file containing an exploit for CVE-2018-8174 leading to the execution of CobInt stage 1.
4 more CVEs tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
146 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Listed in the detection's Annotations section.
Mentioned only as an annotation associated with a detection for PYTHONPATH modification during package installation; no specific Cobalt Group activity is described.
Cobalt Group is listed only in the detection's annotations.
Cobalt Group is listed in the detection's annotations for Python site-hook creation during package installation.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.