I have a couple of questions on my diary entry "Finding Metasploit & Cobalt Strike URLs", thus I made a video that shows the method and explains in detail the checksum calculation.

I don't use this method to go hunting (in proxy logs for example), as the checksum has a low-entropy, thus prone to collisions/false positives. But I do use this when I suspect the presence of Metasploit or Cobalt Strike traffic.

Cobalt Strike beacons often use HTTPS, but the URLs I talked about in my diary entry, are not the ones used by the beacon itself. These are the URLs of the staging shellcode, that precedes the beacon.

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