Cobalt Strike Delivered Through Fake Proof-of-Concept Code

Description

FortiGuard Labs is aware of a report that a Cobalt Strike beacon was attempted to be delivered through a couple of fake Proof-of-Concept (POC) codes hosted on GitHub. The files pretend to be POCs for CVE-2022-26809 and CVE-2022-24500. They have already been removed from GitHub.



Why is this Significant?

This is significant because the attack targeted researchers, pen testers and infosec teams in organizations to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons, which will most likely be used to deliver malware such as ransomware.



What is CVE-2022-26809?

CVE-2022-26809 is a remote procedure call runtime remote code execution vulnerability that affects wide variety of Windows OS that includes Windows 7, 8, 10, 11, Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 and 2022. Assigned a CVSS score of 9.8, successfully exploiting the vulnerability allows an attacker to execute remote code with high privileges on a vulnerable system, leading to a full compromise. The vulnerability was patched as part of Patch Tuesday April 2022.


FortiGuard Labs previously released Threat Signal on CVE-2022-26809. See the Appendix for a link to "Microsoft Released Advisory on a Critical Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in RPC (CVE-2022-26809)".



What is CVE-2022-24500?

CVE-2022-24500 is a Windows SMB remote code execution vulnerability that affects Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 and Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2019 and 2022. The vulnerability has a CVSS score of 8.8, and was patched as part of Patch Tuesday April 2022.


The Microsoft advisory states that "For vulnerability to be exploited, a user would need to access a malicious SMB server to retrieve some data as part of an OS API call. This vulnerability requires that a user with an affected version of Windows access a malicious server. An attacker would have to host a specially crafted server share or website. An attacker would have no way to force users to visit this specially crafted server share or website, but would have to convince them to visit the server share or website, typically by way of an enticement in an email or chat message".



What is Status of Coverage?

FortiGuard Labs detect the fake POCs with the following AV coverage:


W32/Agent.BA!tr.dldr

PossibleThreat


All network IOC's are blocked by the WebFiltering client.