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Cobalt Group, also known as Cobalt, Cobalt Gang, Cobalt Spider, and GOLD KINGSWOOD, is a financially motivated cybercriminal group active since at least 2016. It compromises financial institutions worldwide to steal funds, including through ATM cyber heists. Documented targets include banks and financial organizations in Russia, Slovenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Spain. Its name derives from its abuse of the Cobalt Strike penetration-testing framework. The group gains initial access through spearphishing links and attachments, malicious Office macros, document exploits, and backdoored browser-update packages. Its social engineering impersonates financial institutions, bank customers, judicial bodies, and anti-fraud organizations. Delivery techniques have included password-protected archives, virtual hard disk containers, Excel 4.0 macros, and exploitation of CVE-2017-8759. Principal tools and malware include CobInt, COM-DLL-Dropper, the more_eggs JavaScript backdoor, Threadkit, Cobalt Strike, Mimikatz, PsExec, and SDelete. Cobalt Group establishes persistence through scheduled tasks, Windows services, and logon-triggered execution mechanisms. It exploits vulnerabilities for privilege escalation and uses Remote Desktop Protocol for lateral movement. CobInt supports modular reconnaissance, including process enumeration and screenshot collection, while more_eggs provides command execution and additional payload delivery. Defense-evasion techniques include injection into trusted processes, reflective in-memory loading, XOR and RC4 obfuscation, anti-debugging and sandbox checks, and abuse of legitimate Windows utilities to bypass application-control restrictions.
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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.
44 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
31 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
26 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.
The second, which ran from September 20 to 21, used an exploit for CVE-2017-8759 (patched last September), a code injection/remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s .NET Framework. The vulnerability was used to retrieve and execute Cobalt Strike from a remote server they controlled.
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.
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.
205 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 technique annotations; the content does not attribute ShieldCrash exploitation to this group.
Cobalt Group is listed in the detection's annotations.
Referenced only as an annotated actor associated with the detection technique.
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.