A nascent and genuine penetration screening framework regarded as Nighthawk is possible to acquire danger actors’ interest for its Cobalt Strike-like abilities.
Enterprise security organization Proofpoint said it detected the use of the software package in mid-September 2022 with a amount of exam e-mail despatched making use of generic subject matter lines this kind of as “Just checking in” and “Hope this will work2.”
Nevertheless, there are no indications that a leaked or cracked model of Nighthawk is staying weaponized by threat actors in the wild, Proofpoint researcher Alexander Rausch explained in a generate-up.
Nighthawk, released in December 2021 by a company identified as MDSec, is analogous to its counterparts Cobalt Strike, Sliver, and Brute Ratel, giving a purple team toolset for adversary menace simulation. It really is licensed for £7,500 (or $10,000) for every consumer for a yr.
“Nighthawk is the most highly developed and evasive command-and-handle framework obtainable on the current market,” MDSec notes. “Nighthawk is a really malleable implant designed to circumvent and evade the fashionable security controls normally found in experienced, highly monitored environments.”
In accordance to the Sunnyvale-primarily based firm, the aforementioned email messages contained booby-trapped URLs, which, when clicked, redirected the recipients to an ISO graphic file that contains the Nighthawk loader.
The obfuscated loader will come with the encrypted Nighthawk payload, a C++-based DLL that uses an elaborate set of options to counter detection and fly under the radar.
Of individual notice are mechanisms that can prevent endpoint detection methods from remaining alerted about recently loaded DLLs in the latest method and evade approach memory scans by applying a self-encryption method.
With rogue actors previously leveraging cracked variations of Cobalt Strike and other folks to further their put up-exploitation things to do, Nighthawk could furthermore witness very similar adoption by groups on the lookout to “diversify their techniques and include a reasonably unidentified framework to their arsenal.”
In fact, the superior detection premiums involved with Cobalt Strike and Sliver have led Chinese felony actors to devise option offensive frameworks like Manjusaka and Alchimist in latest months.
“Nighthawk is a mature and state-of-the-art industrial C2 framework for lawful crimson staff functions that is particularly designed for detection evasion, and it does this effectively,” Rausch stated.
“Historic adoption of equipment like Brute Ratel by highly developed adversaries, which include individuals aligned with point out pursuits and engaging in espionage, presents a template for achievable upcoming risk landscape developments.”
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Some parts of this article are sourced from:
thehackernews.com