TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Hundreds of domains that were malicious
have been seized and sinkhole that has
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allowed additional intelligence gathering
to happen from the traffic that's
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going on in there as well,
which has really been great.
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Hello and welcome to Healthcare
Strategies. I'm Jill McKeon,
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associate editor of Health Tech Security.
Today we're joined by Bob Erdman,
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associate Vice President
Research and Development at Fort.
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Welcome Bob.
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Thank you.
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So today we're diving into a really
interesting topic for some background for
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our listeners. In 2023,
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Fort teamed up with Microsoft's Digital
Crimes Unit and the health Information
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Sharing and analysis center or Health
ISAC to crack down on abuse of Cobalt
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Strike,
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which is a legitimate security tool that
cyber threat actors have been abusing
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illegal copies of to perpetrate cyber
attacks against organizations in many
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sectors, including Healthcare. Fort
acquired Cobalt Strike back in 2020.
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Then in March, 2025,
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after two years of this partnership
between Fort Microsoft and Health ISAC
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Fort reported that the
number of unauthorized copies
of Cobalt Strike observed
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in the wild had decreased by
80% over the last two years.
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So today we're going to speak with
Bob about Cobalt strike abuse,
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these successful efforts to crack down
on it and just the value of partnerships
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like this one in the world
of cybersecurity. So Bob,
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it'd be great if you could
start by telling us a little
bit about Cobalt Strike
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and what it's traditionally
used for in the security world.
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Sure.
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So Cobalt Strike is a cybersecurity
tool used by organizations to
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test their defenses and harden them
against any kind of malicious activities
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that may be directed towards them.
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Cobalt Strike's licensing allows for
lawful and ethical penetration testing and
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red team activities and actually forbids
use by military law enforcement or
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intelligence gathering types of use cases
and cobalt strikes generally used in
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an assumed breach type of scenario where
an organization is either we're going
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to assume that we've already been breached
or at some point we're going to be
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breached.
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It differs a little bit from standard
penetration testing where we're just
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looking to find as many vulnerabilities
and open doors and windows as we can
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find,
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and we're actually looking to test fairly
specific scenarios about how a threat
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actor might behave once they gain
access to somebody's environment.
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Definitely. Yeah, so it sounds like a
really useful tool on the defense side,
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but I know that there's been a history
of threat actors abusing legitimate
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tools, not just Cobalt Strike,
but other tools as well.
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So I'm curious what makes
those tactics successful?
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How does abusing a legitimate tool like
Cobalt Strike allow threat actors to
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really succeed in their efforts?
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As you mentioned, unfortunately,
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there's always malicious use of all of
the different tools that are out there.
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Cobalt Strike included, the heavy
lifting is being done by somebody else.
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So we're developing a tool being
used for certain types of scenarios,
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and if they can get ahold
of it and repurpose it,
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they're going to use those
tools for malicious uses.
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Just like when they would abuse email
service deliveries for phishing or
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offensive tools for pen testing or
cobalt strike tools for red teaming,
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the way that they're being breached is
very similar to the way that they're
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being tested. So those threat actors,
if they can get ahold of these tools,
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then of course can repurpose
them for their malicious designs.
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And that's definitely something
that we're doing our best,
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along with many other
entities to crack down on.
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So the use of these tools that
makes it harder for teams to
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detect when these threat
actors are there. It.
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Makes it harder to defend, of course.
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So it makes it easier on the
threat actors of course, too,
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because they don't have to necessarily
develop as much of their own
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Load full transcript
infrastructure around these things.
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If they can insert commercial pieces or
open source pieces that do some of the
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same things,
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that just makes it a little easier
for them to do what they're doing.
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For sure. And I'm curious with
Cobalt Strike specifically,
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how widespread was abuse of this
tool before that partnership formed
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in 2023?
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How did it really impact organizations
across all sectors including healthcare?
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I think there's always been some level
of abuse of all of these types of tools
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where we really saw anything more than
zero to us is too much, of course,
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but where we really saw it starting
to become more prolific was as the
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ransomware, as a service ecosystem
started to grow and move around it.
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So more and more times we were seeing
as part of an attack chain Cobalt strike
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would be included or some tool
very similar to Cobalt Strike.
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So we really started to look at
how those tools were being shared,
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where they were being acquired from and
how these licenses were being abused.
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As we started to dig into that
led us to all these other efforts.
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It's not every attack, like I
said, if it's more than no attacks,
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then of course we're taking notice,
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but it was definitely being favored
among some of the adversary toolkits,
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especially coming out of some of the
usual geographic areas that you'd imagine.
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Right.
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So you started to notice that pattern
kind of increasing of threat actors
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abusing this tool,
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and then your organization teamed
up with Microsoft and Health isac.
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Can you tell me a bit more about how
that partnership came about and what each
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of those entities roles
were in this effort?
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Yeah, I think this was a really great,
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great partnership to have and we saw
some great effects as we were starting to
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see those kinds of things happening.
After we acquired Cobalt Strike,
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we added a lot of additional security
controls inside of the product
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itself to make it harder to abuse,
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and we started tracking where these
different channels were that things were
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being shared and proliferated and some
of the techniques being used and Fort
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was cracking down and engaging with law
enforcement and working through the DMCA
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digital Millennium Copyright Act to go
after the places the tools were being
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passed around. So social media
sites, telegram, Twitter file,
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hosting locations, the magazines
and non files and places like that.
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It was definitely a bit of
whack-a-mole. Of course though,
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as we'd take down two telegram channels
and you'd see three Twitter feeds pop up
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sharing the files, it was having effect,
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but of course not as great as we would've
liked to have seen. And around that
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same time, Microsoft had started their
own internal process and effort to
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track down in the malicious
usage of these types of tools,
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and they reached out to us and actually
wanted to know if we'd like to partner
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up and combine our efforts,
share some data and DCU,
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the Digital Crimes unit had an interesting
legal theory that they wanted to
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pursue based around intellectual
property abuse and allowing us to go
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through the civil side
of the court system,
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which is much faster than going
through the criminal side efforts.
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So we started working together.
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We spent a lot of time building
out processes and pipelines,
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so the ability to quickly share
information between ourselves,
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we each had unique visibility into
different places on the internet,
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and we're able to combine that different
data and fort as the license holder of
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Cobalt Strike. We can quickly
determine if something is legitimate,
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a real customer doing their own red
team operations expose themselves where
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they've been visible, or if it's
somebody using it maliciously,
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and then bringing along all the
law enforcement groups. Of course,
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we also built a way to, in real time,
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be able to share the observations that
we're seeing with law enforcement so that
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they'd be able to take further actions
as needed against these different things.
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And as we
built out this court case,
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it was important for us to also be able
to show the harm that was being caused
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by these malicious actors and activities.
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And that's where Health ISAC came along
and was that third leg of the stool
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being able to represent their clients
and show the court this is what's really
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going on from these activities.
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So it's not just Microsoft
and Ttra complaining about
somebody cheating on their
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licenses,
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but there's actual harm
happening to outside entities
based upon these different
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activities going in there.
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So as we went in and built out that
court case and then we were able to get a
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court order to begin to take action
against these different environments.
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So we spent a lot of time building out
automated pipelines to be able to take
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action against these different places
and around the world really start to push
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back against the abuse of these tools.
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Yeah, it's so interesting to hear just
how that partnership came together.
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Each of these entities were
looking into this on their own,
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and then you joined forces to really
prove just how widespread this issue
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was. Yeah. So I know you
got into this a little bit,
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but I'd love to hear more about just
the results of this multi-year effort to
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disrupt cobalt strike abuse and reduce
the number of unauthorized copies.
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Are there any specific data points that
you can share with us about the overall
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success of this operation?
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Yeah.
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The speed and scale that we're able to
achieve working together has really been
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great. So over time now,
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what essentially happens is when
we observe a copy out in the,
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we can quickly determine is it
unauthorized and malicious? Is it real?
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And then pass that into a notification
pipeline where we send notices to the
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infrastructure providers where
the systems are being run.
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So your Amazons Azures,
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you name the hosting provider
all around the world,
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and leveraged those different providers
to take those systems offline quickly.
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So as far as what we observe
in the wild on a daily basis,
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we've seen roughly an 80% reduction
in the number of systems that the
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different groups and the
different entities that we're
working with are able to
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observe out there.
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And because of the automation of taking
these systems down and getting 'em
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offline,
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that dwell time from when we see a
system to when we see it go down,
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because we monitor and we continue to
enforce those notices until we see it
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taken offline,
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has been greatly reduced. So it's a much
smaller window where a system can be
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observed doing this.
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Hundreds of domains that were malicious
have been seized and sinkhole that has
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allowed additional intelligence gathering
to happen from the traffic that's
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going on in there as well,
which has really been great.
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And while our court order
is in the US, of course,
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so we really have DMCA as a US-based law.
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Most countries cooperate and observe
that or they have something similar in
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their areas of the world similar to that.
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So that allows us to enforce these
different places around the world and have
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this done as expected.
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The remaining systems we do see have been
pushed into a much smaller geographic
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window.
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Most of the traffic now originates
from a very limited set of countries or
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hosting providers where they're
either not as quick to action or they
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have enough cover from their
states to ignore it sometimes,
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but that makes it much easier for us
to defend against now that we see where
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that's happening from. So it's
really been a great result for us,
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and we've had great cooperation
from Microsoft and a number of other
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organizations as well as
global law enforcement.
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And that brings up a great point.
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I think that partnership
between Fort Health isac,
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Microsoft is a big part of it,
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but it also takes cooperation
collaboration between so
many different entities
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to really make that work.
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It really does. It's able to see
something, say something real.
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Anybody who's seeing things now has
places to get that information out.
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We're able on a daily basis to we're
realtime sharing what we see from things
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like cobalt strike, phishing kits,
malicious websites and domains.
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The whole ecosystem around that is
really coming together with information
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sharing activities.
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Fort and everybody else as well are
working with more than just health isac,
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other industry ISACs to really push
back on this all around the world.
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Definitely.
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And I know aside from this particular
partnership for also took part in
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Operation Morpheus,
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which was a multi-year effort by the
UK's national crime agency that also
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constituted a global takedown
of misuse of Cobalt strike.
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So I'm curious how those efforts also
contributed to the success and the
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collaboration there as well.
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Yeah,
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that was another great public private
partnership that Microsoft and Fortor were
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able to take part in. Initially,
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roughly 600 to 700 systems were
identified and the majority of
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those immediately taken down once
that law enforcement action commenced
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Fortria and Microsoft and other private
partners working together with those law
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enforcement teams. Again, we're able
to push back on these. And of course,
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having law enforcement around is great
because they could do things we can't.
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We can get an order to take
down a provider or a site.
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We can't put somebody in handcuffs
where they can. It's great to see.
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It feels like the number of
seized websites, seized servers,
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people getting arrested is
continuing to increase worldwide,
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and that's really good to see to
keep pushing back in the ecosystem.
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For sure. And I know we've already
spoken a lot about just the importance of
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collaboration. It seems to be
the theme of the episode today,
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but I'm curious if we could even double
down on that more and talk about just
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the importance of cross organizational
collaborations and improving cyber
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resilience specifically in healthcare.
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I know that it's such a highly
targeted and highly regulated industry.
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Yeah, I think really important,
and we along with Microsoft,
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have definitely made an effort to share
the techniques that we've used and how
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we came about doing this across different
conferences and webinar and podcasts
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like this. Having those friends,
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being able to work with you can really
enhance your operational capabilities
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and having law enforcement coming along
with us gives us that final place that
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we can go as we're seeing these different
places and these different IOCs.
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So we think it's super important to
have these industry partnerships.
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We work heavily with Microsoft who
work with a lot of other worldwide
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intelligence providers and other defensive
security technology places to do this
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as well.
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Being able to share that information
around and being able to get more pushback
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against these actors, the more friends
you have doing these types of things,
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the more effect we can have and the
greater you can make your security
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resiliency.
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Curious also,
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how you see the landscape of cyber
threats evolving over the next few years
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beyond just cobalt strike
abuse. Just in a general sense.
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We're seeing more and more pickup
in these types of tools. Of course,
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there's other competing tools out there.
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There's starting to be some
open source frameworks.
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As we push down at Cobalt Strike,
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we're seeing an increase in some other
technologies that are similar or maybe
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now at this level of efforts going on.
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They're starting to shift their
tactics a bit, but in general,
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the way that they're initially breaching
these environments is fairly constant
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over time. Phishing is high in
the list generally, number one,
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some form of business, email compromise
or spearfishing targeted attacks,
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weak configurations by
design or by
mistake.
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Missing patches is honestly
still a big one, and
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I don't think those are going to
change a lot in the very near term.
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Those are really effective
ways to breach an environment.
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What we are seeing change a lot is the
tactics around that. It's allowing threat
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actors to be better at it and
more efficient in that scale,
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especially using things like artificial
intelligence and AI technologies
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where we used to see maybe a phishing
email coming out of a foreign country with
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grammar mistakes, missing punctuation.
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You could just tell it wasn't quite
right. They're translating it now with ai,
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they can do that at scale.
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They can target anywhere in the world
and be able to push those things out.
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When we're doing our VUL management
programs and we're looking for vectors and
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patches and maybe systems that
are exposed to the internet,
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the threat actors doing that too,
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and they're doing it with better scale
and technology than they used to in the
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past.
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So they're accelerating what they can do
and how they can do their intelligence
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gathering and have a better way to target
our executives and our employees as
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they're trying to get into
these systems initially.
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And stopping that front line of
defense is getting really important.
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Definitely. Yeah.
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It's interesting to hear that these
threat actors are going back to tried and
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true techniques, phishing, business,
email compromise, those things still work,
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but as you said,
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they're using AI and things like
that to make these attacks even more
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successful. So I'm sure on
the defense side it's tough.
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And we're doing the same
thing on the defensive side.
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We're all starting to use
more machine learning,
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more artificial intelligence to
be able to detect things at scale,
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uncover what's going on across
these different campaigns,
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and being able to more quickly target
these threat actors as they're trying to
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get access to your environments.
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And to close this out,
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I'm curious what advice you'd give to
healthcare organizations that are looking
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to strengthen their cybersecurity
posture in this environment where these
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threats are continuing and advancing.
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A lot of it really is initially make
sure you've got the basics right.
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It's blocking and tackling kind
of things. Do you have a DR plan?
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You probably do.
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When's the last time you actually checked
your incident response and tried to
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exercise it? Do what's going
to happen if you are breached?
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And if something happens, like we
said, in the same breach model,
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you're either assuming you're already
breached or you're going to get breached
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at some point.
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It's just a matter of what
you do afterwards in that
effect to make sure that
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you understand your change of command,
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what things are going to happen and
when and how you're going to do that.
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It's really important.
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Do you have multifactor
authentication enabled everywhere?
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Are you segmenting your networks
so that if you do get compromised,
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that blast radius is limited or things
sitting wide open where they can move
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laterally all across the network as
they come on? How are you managing your
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vulnerability type programs?
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A lot of times what we see
is managing for the numbers.
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I got 10,000 vulnerabilities
today. I can't close 'em all.
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I'm going to knock off 2000 fast ones.
So I have 8,000. It looks great on paper,
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but are you really making risk-based
decisions on what is the most likely
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path someone's going to take to
compromise your crown jewels patient data,
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getting access to devices and things,
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or are you just playing
a numbers type game?
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So doing a risk-based evaluation of
what it is and how you need to protect
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yourself thinking like an attacker would.
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Being able to arrange your
defenses in those types of manners.
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So those are all great ways to start.
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We are definitely seeing
more OT and iot type attacks.
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So medical devices are
right in that chain.
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A lot of those are probably built
with not great security in mind at the
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beginning,
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who's ever going to attack the electronic
interface to my pacemaker? But those
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kinds of things are happening these days,
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and we need to be mindful of all
the different threat vectors.
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And especially as now so many people
have gone to a at least partial work from
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home model. Your visibility
used to be much more controlled.
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People are coming into the office,
they're signing into the network,
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they're sitting at a desk.
Now in many respects,
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people are connecting from anywhere,
working from home, doing jobs,
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third party suppliers, they
have people working from home.
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Your area that you have to be
concerned with has expanded a lot,
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and you need to take all of those
different places into account.
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And that's great advice to think like
the attacker and really tackle it from
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that end. So it was great to
hear about this partnership.
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Always nice to hear a success
story in cybersecurity,
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and I'm sure these efforts
will really continue.
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So thanks so much for joining us
today, Bob. It was a pleasure.
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Yep. Looking forward to further
updates in the future for Fortune,
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Microsoft and Hi Sac. This
is a long-term effort.
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We're expecting many more
years to keep going after this,
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and we'll keep you posted
with more great details.
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Great. Thank you.
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And thank you listener for tuning
in. If you liked what you heard,
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head over to Spotify or
Apple and drop us a review.
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00:19:37,860 --> 00:19:41,310
We'll be choosing some of our reviews
to be read on the show in appreciation.
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So keep listening through to the end
because you might get name dropped.
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See you next time.
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Music by Kyle Murphy and
production by me Kelsey Widdle.
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This is an Informa Tech target production.