I like taking a closer look at captures files posted by Brad. In his latest diary entry, we have a capture file with Cobalt Strike traffic.

With regular expression "^/....$" I look for URIs that are typical for Cobalt Strike shellcode (and Metasploit too):

Following this HTTP stream, I see data that looks encoded and has some repetitions, so this might be some kind of XOR encoding:

I export this data stream as a file:

Then pass it through my 1768.py Cobalt Strike beacon analysis tool:

And this is indeed the configuration of a beacon.

Didier Stevens
Senior handler
Microsoft MVP
blog.DidierStevens.com DidierStevensLabs.com