Taking Action

RAWAD SARIEDDINE, SENIOR DIRECTOR AT CYBERSECURITY AND THREAT RESPONSE SERVICES FIRM CROWDSTRIKE, DELVES INTO THE GROWING THREAT LANDSCAPE AND SHARES INSIGHTS INTO HOW ORGANISATIONS CAN TURN THE TABLES AGAINST THE BAD GUYS BY EFFECTIVELY TRACKING THREATS IN THE CYBER HUNTING GROUND.

- Rawad Sarieddine

Every year organisations from across the world are increasing their security budgets to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the latest cybersecurity products, services, and training. Yet, cyber-attacks and data breaches persist and remain a regular occurrence.

A recent study by Cybersecurity Ventures revealed that cybersecurity spending is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2021. However, it also noted that annual global losses from cyber-attacks are expected to hit $6 trillion by the same year.

These concerning figures show how current cybersecurity models are becoming inept and outdated. Many security strategies are still only focused on building up perimeter defences and deploying solutions that are aimed at stopping malware. All the while, adversaries are growing more sophisticated and disruptive, outpacing the advancements in defence technologies, processes and policies.

Among the latest threats permeating in the cyber landscape today is malware-free attacks.

Malware-free attacks execute malicious scripts by piggybacking on legitimate software packages.

“Typically, malware-free compromises involved taking a legitimate process, that is part of the operating system, hijacking it in some way and causing it to perform nefarious tasks at the bidding of the threat actor,” says Rawad Sarieddine, senior director, CrowdStrike.

“One method might be to inject some malicious code, allowing the hacker to take control of the process, or to simply use a browser or application to connect to command and control servers outside the organisation,” he explains.

Following this, the attacker is free to take a variety of actions – downloading malicious content, creating backdoors to return later, or begin exfiltrating data at their leisure.