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April 17, 2024

Sliver C2: How Darktrace Provided a Sliver of Hope in the Face of an Emerging C2 Framework

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17
Apr 2024
This blog discusses Sliver, a legitimate C2 framework that has recently been utilized by malicious actors as an alternative to Cobalt Strike. Darktrace was able to detect multiple cases of attackers using Sliver C2 in 2023 and 2024.

Offensive Security Tools

As organizations globally seek to for ways to bolster their digital defenses and safeguard their networks against ever-changing cyber threats, security teams are increasingly adopting offensive security tools to simulate cyber-attacks and assess the security posture of their networks. These legitimate tools, however, can sometimes be exploited by real threat actors and used as genuine actor vectors.

What is Sliver C2?

Sliver C2 is a legitimate open-source command-and-control (C2) framework that was released in 2020 by the security organization Bishop Fox. Silver C2 was originally intended for security teams and penetration testers to perform security tests on their digital environments [1] [2] [5]. In recent years, however, the Sliver C2 framework has become a popular alternative to Cobalt Strike and Metasploit for many attackers and Advanced Persistence Threat (APT) groups who adopt this C2 framework for unsolicited and ill-intentioned activities.

The use of Sliver C2 has been observed in conjunction with various strains of Rust-based malware, such as KrustyLoader, to provide backdoors enabling lines of communication between attackers and their malicious C2 severs [6]. It is unsurprising, then, that it has also been leveraged to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities, including critical vulnerabilities in the Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure services.

In early 2024, Darktrace observed the malicious use of Sliver C2 during an investigation into post-exploitation activity on customer networks affected by the Ivanti vulnerabilities. Fortunately for affected customers, Darktrace DETECT™ was able to recognize the suspicious network-based connectivity that emerged alongside Sliver C2 usage and promptly brought it to the attention of customer security teams for remediation.

How does Silver C2 work?

Given its open-source nature, the Sliver C2 framework is extremely easy to access and download and is designed to support multiple operating systems (OS), including MacOS, Windows, and Linux [4].

Sliver C2 generates implants (aptly referred to as ‘slivers’) that operate on a client-server architecture [1]. An implant contains malicious code used to remotely control a targeted device [5]. Once a ‘sliver’ is deployed on a compromised device, a line of communication is established between the target device and the central C2 server. These connections can then be managed over Mutual TLS (mTLS), WireGuard, HTTP(S), or DNS [1] [4]. Sliver C2 has a wide-range of features, which include dynamic code generation, compile-time obfuscation, multiplayer-mode, staged and stageless payloads, procedurally generated C2 over HTTP(S) and DNS canary blue team detection [4].

Why Do Attackers Use Sliver C2?

Amidst the multitude of reasons why malicious actors opt for Sliver C2 over its counterparts, one stands out: its relative obscurity. This lack of widespread recognition means that security teams may overlook the threat, failing to actively search for it within their networks [3] [5].

Although the presence of Sliver C2 activity could be representative of authorized and expected penetration testing behavior, it could also be indicative of a threat actor attempting to communicate with its malicious infrastructure, so it is crucial for organizations and their security teams to identify such activity at the earliest possible stage.

Darktrace’s Coverage of Sliver C2 Activity

Darktrace’s anomaly-based approach to threat detection means that it does not explicitly attempt to attribute or distinguish between specific C2 infrastructures. Despite this, Darktrace was able to connect Sliver C2 usage to phases of an ongoing attack chain related to the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances in January 2024.

Around the time that the zero-day Ivanti vulnerabilities were disclosed, Darktrace detected an internal server on one customer network deviating from its expected pattern of activity. The device was observed making regular connections to endpoints associated with Pulse Secure Cloud Licensing, indicating it was an Ivanti server. It was observed connecting to a string of anomalous hostnames, including ‘cmjk3d071amc01fu9e10ae5rt9jaatj6b.oast[.]live’ and ‘cmjft14b13vpn5vf9i90xdu6akt5k3pnx.oast[.]pro’, via HTTP using the user agent ‘curl/7.19.7 (i686-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.63.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2n zlib/1.2.7’.

Darktrace further identified that the URI requested during these connections was ‘/’ and the top-level domains (TLDs) of the endpoints in question were known Out-of-band Application Security Testing (OAST) server provider domains, namely ‘oast[.]live’ and ‘oast[.]pro’. OAST is a testing method that is used to verify the security posture of an application by testing it for vulnerabilities from outside of the network [7]. This activity triggered the DETECT model ‘Compromise / Possible Tunnelling to Bin Services’, which breaches when a device is observed sending DNS requests for, or connecting to, ‘request bin’ services. Malicious actors often abuse such services to tunnel data via DNS or HTTP requests. In this specific incident, only two connections were observed, and the total volume of data transferred was relatively low (2,302 bytes transferred externally). It is likely that the connections to OAST servers represented malicious actors testing whether target devices were vulnerable to the Ivanti exploits.

The device proceeded to make several SSL connections to the IP address 103.13.28[.]40, using the destination port 53, which is typically reserved for DNS requests. Darktrace recognized that this activity was unusual as the offending device had never previously been observed using port 53 for SSL connections.

Model Breach Event Log displaying the ‘Application Protocol on Uncommon Port’ DETECT model breaching in response to the unusual use of port 53.
Figure 1: Model Breach Event Log displaying the ‘Application Protocol on Uncommon Port’ DETECT model breaching in response to the unusual use of port 53.

Figure 2: Model Breach Event Log displaying details pertaining to the ‘Application Protocol on Uncommon Port’ DETECT model breach, including the 100% rarity of the port usage.
Figure 2: Model Breach Event Log displaying details pertaining to the ‘Application Protocol on Uncommon Port’ DETECT model breach, including the 100% rarity of the port usage.

Further investigation into the suspicious IP address revealed that it had been flagged as malicious by multiple open-source intelligence (OSINT) vendors [8]. In addition, OSINT sources also identified that the JARM fingerprint of the service running on this IP and port (00000000000000000043d43d00043de2a97eabb398317329f027c66e4c1b01) was linked to the Sliver C2 framework and the mTLS protocol it is known to use [4] [5].

An Additional Example of Darktrace’s Detection of Sliver C2

However, it was not just during the January 2024 exploitation of Ivanti services that Darktrace observed cases of Sliver C2 usages across its customer base.  In March 2023, for example, Darktrace detected devices on multiple customer accounts making beaconing connections to malicious endpoints linked to Sliver C2 infrastructure, including 18.234.7[.]23 [10] [11] [12] [13].

Darktrace identified that the observed connections to this endpoint contained the unusual URI ‘/NIS-[REDACTED]’ which contained 125 characters, including numbers, lower and upper case letters, and special characters like “_”, “/”, and “-“, as well as various other URIs which suggested attempted data exfiltration:

‘/upload/api.html?c=[REDACTED] &fp=[REDACTED]’

  • ‘/samples.html?mx=[REDACTED] &s=[REDACTED]’
  • ‘/actions/samples.html?l=[REDACTED] &tc=[REDACTED]’
  • ‘/api.html?gf=[REDACTED] &x=[REDACTED]’
  • ‘/samples.html?c=[REDACTED] &zo=[REDACTED]’

This anomalous external connectivity was carried out through multiple destination ports, including the key ports 443 and 8888.

Darktrace additionally observed devices on affected customer networks performing TLS beaconing to the IP address 44.202.135[.]229 with the JA3 hash 19e29534fd49dd27d09234e639c4057e. According to OSINT sources, this JA3 hash is associated with the Golang TLS cipher suites in which the Sliver framework is developed [14].

Conclusion

Despite its relative novelty in the threat landscape and its lesser-known status compared to other C2 frameworks, Darktrace has demonstrated its ability effectively detect malicious use of Sliver C2 across numerous customer environments. This included instances where attackers exploited vulnerabilities in the Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure services.

While human security teams may lack awareness of this framework, and traditional rules and signatured-based security tools might not be fully equipped and updated to detect Sliver C2 activity, Darktrace’s Self Learning AI understands its customer networks, users, and devices. As such, Darktrace is adept at identifying subtle deviations in device behavior that could indicate network compromise, including connections to new or unusual external locations, regardless of whether attackers use established or novel C2 frameworks, providing organizations with a sliver of hope in an ever-evolving threat landscape.

Credit to Natalia Sánchez Rocafort, Cyber Security Analyst, Paul Jennings, Principal Analyst Consultant

Appendices

DETECT Model Coverage

  • Compromise / Repeating Connections Over 4 Days
  • Anomalous Connection / Application Protocol on Uncommon Port
  • Anomalous Server Activity / Server Activity on New Non-Standard Port
  • Compromise / Sustained TCP Beaconing Activity To Rare Endpoint
  • Compromise / Quick and Regular Windows HTTP Beaconing
  • Compromise / High Volume of Connections with Beacon Score
  • Anomalous Connection / Multiple Failed Connections to Rare Endpoint
  • Compromise / Slow Beaconing Activity To External Rare
  • Compromise / HTTP Beaconing to Rare Destination
  • Compromise / Sustained SSL or HTTP Increase
  • Compromise / Large Number of Suspicious Failed Connections
  • Compromise / SSL or HTTP Beacon
  • Compromise / Possible Malware HTTP Comms
  • Compromise / Possible Tunnelling to Bin Services
  • Anomalous Connection / Low and Slow Exfiltration to IP
  • Device / New User Agent
  • Anomalous Connection / New User Agent to IP Without Hostname
  • Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location
  • Anomalous File / Numeric File Download
  • Anomalous Connection / Powershell to Rare External
  • Anomalous Server Activity / New Internet Facing System

List of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

18.234.7[.]23 - Destination IP - Likely C2 Server

103.13.28[.]40 - Destination IP - Likely C2 Server

44.202.135[.]229 - Destination IP - Likely C2 Server

References

[1] https://bishopfox.com/tools/sliver

[2] https://vk9-sec.com/how-to-set-up-use-c2-sliver/

[3] https://www.scmagazine.com/brief/sliver-c2-framework-gaining-traction-among-threat-actors

[4] https://github[.]com/BishopFox/sliver

[5] https://www.cybereason.com/blog/sliver-c2-leveraged-by-many-threat-actors

[6] https://securityaffairs.com/158393/malware/ivanti-connect-secure-vpn-deliver-krustyloader.html

[7] https://www.xenonstack.com/insights/out-of-band-application-security-testing

[8] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/103.13.28.40/detection

[9] https://threatfox.abuse.ch/browse.php?search=ioc%3A107.174.78.227

[10] https://threatfox.abuse.ch/ioc/1074576/

[11] https://threatfox.abuse.ch/ioc/1093887/

[12] https://threatfox.abuse.ch/ioc/846889/

[13] https://threatfox.abuse.ch/ioc/1093889/

[14] https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/issues/3330

Inside the SOC
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
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Natalia Sánchez Rocafort
Cyber Security Analyst
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January 29, 2025

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Inside the SOC

Bytesize Security: Insider Threats in Google Workspace

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What is an insider threat?

An insider threat is a cyber risk originating from within an organization. These threats can involve actions such as an employee inadvertently clicking on a malicious link (e.g., a phishing email) or an employee with malicious intent conducting data exfiltration for corporate sabotage.

Insiders often exploit their knowledge and access to legitimate corporate tools, presenting a continuous risk to organizations. Defenders must protect their digital estate against threats from both within and outside the organization.

For example, in the summer of 2024, Darktrace / IDENTITY successfully detected a user in a customer environment attempting to steal sensitive data from a trusted Google Workspace service. Despite the use of a legitimate and compliant corporate tool, Darktrace identified anomalies in the user’s behavior that indicated malicious intent.

Attack overview: Insider threat

In June 2024, Darktrace detected unusual activity involving the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) account of a former employee from a customer organization. This individual, who had recently left the company, was observed downloading a significant amount of data in the form of a “.INDD” file (an Adobe InDesign document typically used to create page layouts [1]) from Google Drive.

While the use of Google Drive and other Google Workspace platforms was not unexpected for this employee, Darktrace identified that the user had logged in from an unfamiliar and suspicious IPv6 address before initiating the download. This anomaly triggered a model alert in Darktrace / IDENTITY, flagging the activity as potentially malicious.

A Model Alert in Darktrace / IDENTITY showing the unusual “.INDD” file being downloaded from Google Workspace.
Figure 1: A Model Alert in Darktrace / IDENTITY showing the unusual “.INDD” file being downloaded from Google Workspace.

Following this detection, the customer reached out to Darktrace’s Security Operations Center (SOC) team via the Security Operations Support service for assistance in triaging and investigating the incident further. Darktrace’s SOC team conducted an in-depth investigation, enabling the customer to identify the exact moment of the file download, as well as the contents of the stolen documents. The customer later confirmed that the downloaded files contained sensitive corporate data, including customer details and payment information, likely intended for reuse or sharing with a new employer.

In this particular instance, Darktrace’s Autonomous Response capability was not active, allowing the malicious insider to successfully exfiltrate the files. If Autonomous Response had been enabled, Darktrace would have immediately acted upon detecting the login from an unusual (in this case 100% rare) location by logging out and disabling the SaaS user. This would have provided the customer with the necessary time to review the activity and verify whether the user was authorized to access their SaaS environments.

Conclusion

Insider threats pose a significant challenge for traditional security tools as they involve internal users who are expected to access SaaS platforms. These insiders have preexisting knowledge of the environment, sensitive data, and how to make their activities appear normal, as seen in this case with the use of Google Workspace. This familiarity allows them to avoid having to use more easily detectable intrusion methods like phishing campaigns.

Darktrace’s anomaly detection capabilities, which focus on identifying unusual activity rather than relying on specific rules and signatures, enable it to effectively detect deviations from a user’s expected behavior. For instance, an unusual login from a new location, as in this example, can be flagged even if the subsequent malicious activity appears innocuous due to the use of a trusted application like Google Drive.

Credit to Vivek Rajan (Cyber Analyst) and Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead)

Appendices

Darktrace Model Detections

SaaS / Resource::Unusual Download Of Externally Shared Google Workspace File

References

[1]https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/vector/indd-file.html

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Technqiue – Tactic – ID

Data from Cloud Storage Object – COLLECTION -T1530

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Vivek Rajan
Cyber Analyst

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January 28, 2025

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Reimaginar su SOC: cómo lograr una seguridad de red proactiva

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Introduction: Challenges and solutions to SOC efficiency

For Security Operation Centers (SOCs), reliance on signature or rule-based tools – solutions that are always chasing the latest update to prevent only what is already known – creates an excess of false positives. SOC analysts are therefore overwhelmed by a high volume of context-lacking alerts, with human analysts able to address only about 10% due to time and resource constraints. This forces many teams to accept the risks of addressing only a fraction of the alerts while novel threats go completely missed.

74% of practitioners are already grappling with the impact of an AI-powered threat landscape, which amplifies challenges like tool sprawl, alert fatigue, and burnout. Thus, achieving a resilient network, where SOC teams can spend most of their time getting proactive and stopping threats before they occur, feels like an unrealistic goal as attacks are growing more frequent.

Despite advancements in security technology (advanced detection systems with AI, XDR tools, SIEM aggregators, etc...), practitioners are still facing the same issues of inefficiency in their SOC, stopping them from becoming proactive. How can they select security solutions that help them achieve a proactive state without dedicating more human hours and resources to managing and triaging alerts, tuning rules, investigating false positives, and creating reports?

To overcome these obstacles, organizations must leverage security technology that is able to augment and support their teams. This can happen in the following ways:

  1. Full visibility across the modern network expanding into hybrid environments
  2. Have tools that identifies and stops novel threats autonomously, without causing downtime
  3. Apply AI-led analysis to reduce time spent on manual triage and investigation

Your current solutions might be holding you back

Traditional cybersecurity point solutions are reliant on using global threat intelligence to pattern match, determine signatures, and consequently are chasing the latest update to prevent only what is known. This means that unknown threats will evade detection until a patient zero is identified. This legacy approach to threat detection means that at least one organization needs to be ‘patient zero’, or the first victim of a novel attack before it is formally identified.

Even the point solutions that claim to use AI to enhance threat detection rely on a combination of supervised machine learning, deep learning, and transformers to

train and inform their systems. This entails shipping your company’s data out to a large data lake housed somewhere in the cloud where it gets blended with attack data from thousands of other organizations. The resulting homogenized dataset gets used to train AI systems — yours and everyone else’s — to recognize patterns of attack based on previously encountered threats.

While using AI in this way reduces the workload of security teams who would traditionally input this data by hand, it emanates the same risk – namely, that AI systems trained on known threats cannot deal with the threats of tomorrow. Ultimately, it is the unknown threats that bring down an organization.

The promise and pitfalls of XDR in today's threat landscape

Enter Extended Detection and Response (XDR): a platform approach aimed at unifying threat detection across the digital environment. XDR was developed to address the limitations of traditional, fragmented tools by stitching together data across domains, providing SOC teams with a more cohesive, enterprise-wide view of threats. This unified approach allows for improved detection of suspicious activities that might otherwise be missed in siloed systems.

However, XDR solutions still face key challenges: they often depend heavily on human validation, which can aggravate the already alarmingly high alert fatigue security analysts experience, and they remain largely reactive, focusing on detecting and responding to threats rather than helping prevent them. Additionally, XDR frequently lacks full domain coverage, relying on EDR as a foundation and are insufficient in providing native NDR capabilities and visibility, leaving critical gaps that attackers can exploit. This is reflected in the current security market, with 57% of organizations reporting that they plan to integrate network security products into their current XDR toolset[1].

Why settling is risky and how to unlock SOC efficiency

The result of these shortcomings within the security solutions market is an acceptance of inevitable risk. From false positives driving the barrage of alerts, to the siloed tooling that requires manual integration, and the lack of multi-domain visibility requiring human intervention for business context, security teams have accepted that not all alerts can be triaged or investigated.

While prioritization and processes have improved, the SOC is operating under a model that is overrun with alerts that lack context, meaning that not all of them can be investigated because there is simply too much for humans to parse through. Thus, teams accept the risk of leaving many alerts uninvestigated, rather than finding a solution to eliminate that risk altogether.

Darktrace / NETWORK is designed for your Security Operations Center to eliminate alert triage with AI-led investigations , and rapidly detect and respond to known and unknown threats. This includes the ability to scale into other environments in your infrastructure including cloud, OT, and more.

Beyond global threat intelligence: Self-Learning AI enables novel threat detection & response

Darktrace does not rely on known malware signatures, external threat intelligence, historical attack data, nor does it rely on threat trained machine learning to identify threats.

Darktrace’s unique Self-learning AI deeply understands your business environment by analyzing trillions of real-time events that understands your normal ‘pattern of life’, unique to your business. By connecting isolated incidents across your business, including third party alerts and telemetry, Darktrace / NETWORK uses anomaly chains to identify deviations from normal activity.

The benefit to this is that when we are not predefining what we are looking for, we can spot new threats, allowing end users to identify both known threats and subtle, never-before-seen indicators of malicious activity that traditional solutions may miss if they are only looking at historical attack data.

AI-led investigations empower your SOC to prioritize what matters

Anomaly detection is often criticized for yielding high false positives, as it flags deviations from expected patterns that may not necessarily indicate a real threat or issues. However, Darktrace applies an investigation engine to automate alert triage and address alert fatigue.

Darktrace’s Cyber AI Analyst revolutionizes security operations by conducting continuous, full investigations across Darktrace and third-party alerts, transforming the alert triage process. Instead of addressing only a fraction of the thousands of daily alerts, Cyber AI Analyst automatically investigates every relevant alert, freeing up your team to focus on high-priority incidents and close security gaps.

Powered by advanced machine-learning techniques, including unsupervised learning, models trained by expert analysts, and tailored security language models, Cyber AI Analyst emulates human investigation skills, testing hypotheses, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. According to Darktrace Internal Research, Cyber AI Analyst typically provides a SOC with up to  50,000 additional hours of Level 2 analysis and written reporting annually, enriching security operations by producing high level incident alerts with full details so that human analysts can focus on Level 3 tasks.

Containing threats with Autonomous Response

Simply quarantining a device is rarely the best course of action - organizations need to be able to maintain normal operations in the face of threats and choose the right course of action. Different organizations also require tailored response functions because they have different standards and protocols across a variety of unique devices. Ultimately, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to automated response actions puts organizations at risk of disrupting business operations.

Darktrace’s Autonomous Response tailors its actions to contain abnormal behavior across users and digital assets by understanding what is normal and stopping only what is not. Unlike blanket quarantines, it delivers a bespoke approach, blocking malicious activities that deviate from regular patterns while ensuring legitimate business operations remain uninterrupted.

Darktrace offers fully customizable response actions, seamlessly integrating with your workflows through hundreds of native integrations and an open API. It eliminates the need for costly development, natively disarming threats in seconds while extending capabilities with third-party tools like firewalls, EDR, SOAR, and ITSM solutions.

Unlocking a proactive state of security

Securing the network isn’t just about responding to incidents — it’s about being proactive, adaptive, and prepared for the unexpected. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF 2.0) emphasizes this by highlighting the need for focused risk management, continuous incident response (IR) refinement, and seamless integration of these processes with your detection and response capabilities.

Despite advancements in security technology, achieving a proactive posture is still a challenge to overcome because SOC teams face inefficiencies from reliance on pattern-matching tools, which generate excessive false positives and leave many alerts unaddressed, while novel threats go undetected. If SOC teams are spending all their time investigating alerts then there is no time spent getting ahead of attacks.

Achieving proactive network resilience — a state where organizations can confidently address challenges at every stage of their security posture — requires strategically aligned solutions that work seamlessly together across the attack lifecycle.

References

1.       Market Guide for Extended Detection and Response, Gartner, 17thAugust 2023 - ID G00761828

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