• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.721-736
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• 2023

The Command and Control Framework was developed for penetration testing and education purposes, but threat actors such as cybercrime groups are abusing it. From a cyber threat hunting perspective, identifying Command and Control Framework servers as well as proactive responding such as blocking the server can contribute to risk management. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology for tracking the Command and Control Framework in advance. The methodology consists of four steps: collecting a list of Command and Control Framework-related server, emulating staged delivery, extracting botnet configurations, and collecting certificates that feature is going to be extracted. Additionally, experiments are conducted by applying the proposed methodology to Cobalt Strike, a commercial Command and Control Framework. Collected beacons and certificate from the experiments are shared to establish a cyber threat response basis that could be caused from the Command and Control Framework.