Hands-On Red Team Tactics

Chapter 9: Cobalt Strike – Red Team Operations

1. No, Cobalt strike is a paid software which costs about USD 3500 per annum and renewal of license is USD 2500.
2. Yes , Cobalt Strike has an external C2 module in it which allows other programs to act as a middle-man between Cobalt Strike and its Beacon payload.
3. Cobalt Strike's beacon have a mallable C2 profile which define how the communication happens and the data is stored. There are a different C2 profiles which can be downloaded from GitHub and used to avoid detection. https://github.com/rsmudge/Malleable-C2-Profiles.
4. Older versions of Cobalt Strike used Metasploit Framework, but the new versions are independent and do not depend on Metasploit Framework.