Hands-On Red Team Tactics

Pivoting through Cobalt Strike

We have already covered the different ways of pivoting and why this is necessary in Chapter 6, Pivoting. In this section, we will look at the ways we can pivot into a network using Cobalt Strike.

Cobalt Strike allows us to pivot in three ways:

• SOCKS Server
• Listener
• Deploy VPN

The preceding pivot can be explained as follows:

• SOCKS Server: This will create a SOCKS4 proxy on our team server. All the connections that go through this SOCKS proxy will be converted into tasks for the beacon to execute. This allows us to tunnel inside the network through any type of beacon. To set up a SOCKS Server, we right-click the host, choose Pivoting | SOCKS Server, shown as follows:

A new window will then open, asking for ...