On November 11, 2020, a user named FreakBoy allegedly released the source code to Cobalt Strike 4.0. Cobalt Strike is a known closed-source and legitimate post-exploitation toolkit often used by red teams and penetration testers. Incidents like this have occurred and cracked but compiled, versions of the tool have seen releases from various sources. Based on what Binary Defense has seen of the repository, the code used for the paid license has been commented out and is not required to run effectively. Based on Bleeping Computer’s reporting and communication with Advanced Intel’s Vitali Kremez, the repository owner removed the standard dependencies and replaced them with open-source variants.