Randomized Malleable C2 Profiles Made Easy

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Free

Updated 11 March 2025

Malleable Command and Control (C2) profiles provide red teamers and penetration testers with a wealth of options to modify how Cobalt Strike both appears on the wire and on the compromised host. Malleable C2 can be used to impersonate actual threat actors or normal web traffic. As with every advancement in offensive tradecraft, blue teams and defensive products are bound to implement static signature-based protections. In my opinion, a defender should use any resources available, including signature-based detections; however, they shouldn’t rely on any one defensive technique. As red teamers, it’s our job to exercise the blue team’s controls and processes and this is precisely what Malleable C2 profiles permit us to exercise. In this blog post, I’ll detail a script I wrote to randomize Malleable C2 profiles, allowing us to customize the same profile template every time we use it and hopefully reduce the chances of flagging static, signature-based detection controls. The script is available here. The Script The script randomizes Cobalt Strike Malleable C2 profiles through the use of a metalanguage, replacing keywords with random, pre-configured strings. In short, the script parses the provided template, substitutes the variables for a random value from either a provided or b