While Cobalt Gang 1.0 uses ThreadKit extensively, Cobalt 2.0 adds sophistication to its delivery method, borrowing some of the network infrastructures used by both APT28 (aka Fancy Bear) and MuddyWater. One of the Cobalt 2.0 Group’s latest campaigns, an attack that leads to a Cobalt Strike beacon and to JavaScript backdoor, was investigated and presented by the Talos research team. Cobalt Group Technical Details . Stage 1 - Word Macro + Whitelisting Bypass . As with many other campaigns, the victim received a document with malicious macro visual basic code. In our case the attacker abused cmstp to execute JavaScript scriptlet (XML with JS) that is downloaded from the e-dropbox[.]biz site. Although some security solutions will block all PureBasic programs (wrong move – there are plenty of legitimate PureBasic programs in use today), it’s a smart move made by the attacker group. The right side of the pair is the name of the JavaScript in the next stage (stage 4) , while the left side of the pair represents the file that will be downloaded as part of stage 5. Such a combination of registry manipulation was reported a year ago as part of an attack campaign executed by the Cobalt Group against Ukrainian banks. As part of the last execution step of the dll, the malicious code writes a JavaScript scriptlet into the Roaming directory and then it executes CreateProcess on the regsvr32 as described by the UserInitMprLogonScript. Stage 5 - JavaScript Backdoor . The last stage JavaScript is downloaded from hxxps://server.vestacp[.]kz/robots.txt. Organizations should expect to see much more coming from all Cobalt Group factions during the next year