ABUSING CORTEX XDR LIVE TERMINAL AS A C2 - INFOGUARD LABS

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

InfoGuard researchers demonstrated that Palo Alto's Cortex XDR Live Terminal feature can be abused as a pre-installed, EDR-trusted C2 channel, offering command execution, file transfer, and evasion capabilities through traffic that blends natively into enterprise network flows. The attack exploits a trivial URL validation flaw in cortex-xdr-payload.exe and the absence of mutual authentication or cryptographic command signing, allowing attackers to redirect connections to their own infrastructure via cross-tenant hijacking or a custom WebSocket server. Defenders should monitor for cortex-xdr-payload.exe spawned by any parent process other than cyserver.exe, while Palo Alto's claimed fix in versions 8.7-8.9 was not confirmed effective as of February.