analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration

analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration is a skill for Claude Code from plurigrid/asi. It costs 42 tokens per session (3,258 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration, MIT.

A malware-analysis workflow for extracting settings from Cobalt Strike Beacon files or memory dumps. Cobalt Strike is a legitimate security-testing tool that attackers also use, and its Beacon settings can identify communication servers and other operator choices.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine PE files, shellcode, or memory dumps during incident response and map command-and-control activity.
Why use it?
It exposes attacker infrastructure and configuration details that may be hidden inside a malicious file or running process.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the asi plugin — 56 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to examine PE files, shellcode, or memory dumps during incident response and map command-and-control activity.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add plurigrid/asi --skill analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/plurigrid/asi

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install asi, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/plurigrid/asi/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,258 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00042 $0.03258
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.01629
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00652
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00326

Measured 7d ago against content hash 5c2fb42bc6ad, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration — 26 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/asi/skills/analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration/SKILL.md · 369 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 369 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analyzing Cobalt Strike Beacon Configuration

Overview

Cobalt Strike is a commercial adversary simulation tool widely abused by threat actors for post-exploitation operations. Beacon payloads contain embedded configuration data that reveals C2 server addresses, communication protocols, sleep intervals, jitter values, malleable C2 profile settings, watermark identifiers, and encryption keys. Extracting this configuration from PE files, shellcode, or memory dumps is critical for incident responders to map attacker infrastructure and attribute campaigns. The beacon configuration is XOR-encoded using a single byte (0x69 for version 3, 0x2e for version 4) and stored in a Type-Length-Value (TLV) format within the .data section.

When to Use

  • When investigating security incidents that require analyzing cobalt strike beacon configuration
  • When building detection rules or threat hunting queries for this domain
  • When SOC analysts need structured procedures for this analysis type
  • When validating security monitoring coverage for related attack techniques

Prerequisites

  • Python 3.9+ with dissect.cobaltstrike, pefile, yara-python
  • SentinelOne CobaltStrikeParser (parse_beacon_config.py)
  • Hex editor (010 Editor, HxD) for manual inspection
  • Understanding of PE file format and XOR encoding
  • Memory dump acquisition tools (Volatility3, WinDbg)
  • Network analysis tools (Wireshark) for C2 traffic correlation

Key Concepts

Beacon Configuration Structure

Cobalt Strike beacons store their configuration as a blob of TLV (Type-Length-Value) entries within the .data section of the PE. Stageless beacons XOR the entire beacon code with a 4-byte key. The configuration blob itself uses a single-byte XOR key. Each TLV entry contains a 2-byte type identifier (e.g., 0x0001 for BeaconType, 0x0008 for C2Server), a 2-byte length, and variable-length data.

Malleable C2 Profiles

The beacon configuration encodes the malleable C2 profile that dictates HTTP request/response transformations, including URI paths, headers, metadata encoding (Base64, NetBIOS), and data transforms. Analyzing these settings reveals how the beacon disguises its traffic to blend with legitimate web traffic.

Read the full file on GitHub · 369 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 369 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 5c2fb42bc6ad

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration is a skill published in the GitHub repository plurigrid/asi (62 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 3,258 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to analyzing-cobalt-strike-beacon-configuration, differing in 26 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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