How To Identify Unknown And Evasive Threats
In recent years, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats that use evasion. This trend is likely due to the fact that many of today’s threat actors are organized criminal groups looking to hide their activities behind the cloak of legitimacy. As a result, cyber security teams must adapt quickly to keep up with evolving attack methods and technologies. Read on what precisely evasive threats mean and how to prevent them.
What is an Evasive Threat?
An Evasive threat is a form of cyberattack where hackers try to hide their identity or whereabouts from security systems. They usually employ techniques like spoofing IP addresses, proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and others.
Evasion is one of the most common techniques used by attackers. They use evasion to avoid detection, evade law enforcement, and even escape prosecution. In some cases, the attacker uses multiple forms of evasion, such as hiding malicious code inside legitimate software, encrypting data, and concealing command-and-control servers. These tactics make it difficult for organizations to detect attacks, track them down, and respond appropriately.
How can Evasive Threat actors be caught?
Even if an intruder has been trained to be the best at hiding his tracks, he will only sometimes succeed. It’s up to us to understand our target and develop a strategy for finding him.
Here are some key things you can do when trying to detect hidden threat actors :
Identify sensitive information and file permissions
First, identify which files contain Personally identifiable information (PII) and other regulated information, then determine who owns them and whether they can be accessed from outside the organization. Files that aren’t needed anymore should be archived.
Manage users’ privileges
You should have a clear view of all your users, including regular users, service accounts, and privileged account holders, and the privileges and rights they possess. Monitoring changes in these privileges can help spot suspicious activity. The least privilege approach is recommended so all users can only see the information they need to perform their jobs.
Monitor key system components
It’s important to have insight into the many different components that attackers may target. For instance, if an organization uses Microsoft Windows Active Directory, they need to understand the differences between user accounts, servers, groups, privileges, etc.
Identifying high-value users
Correlating user activities to specific device types will allow us to recognize when someone logged into multiple computers without actually doing anything suspicious. Knowing which type of computer was accessed at each time will also help detect anomalies.
Challenges to Identifying Evasive Threats
When organizations identify and prevent threats, they must contend with three major challenges: the market for threats, traditional defenses, and open-source vulnerabilities.
Cybercriminals are increasingly turning to new methods of attack, including those that evade traditional security solutions. These attacks are often referred to as “evasive” because they avoid being detected by conventional antivirus software. To detect these types of attacks, organizations must rely on sandboxing technologies. Sandboxing refers to the practice of isolating applications within a virtual environment so that they cannot access sensitive data or perform actions outside of what was intended.
When organizations try to detect and block malicious software activity, they often miss important threats because of their limited visibility into the network environment. Here are three things they need to understand before they can effectively combat evasive malware attacks.
Existence of Evasive Threats Marketplace
Cybersecurity experts have developed ways to spot malicious software (malicious code) before it infects computers. At the same time, hackers have used automation and off-the-shelf technology to create automated tools that allow them to launch targeted attacks without spending hours writing custom scripts. These developments have made it easier for hackers to carry out sophisticated attacks and increased the chances of success.
Traditional Defenses aren’t enough anymore.
Malicious software often evades detection by using techniques such as hiding itself within legitimate files, avoiding user interaction, and running inside a virtualized operating system. It looks for signs that the program is running in a virtual environment, including things like the presence of a virtual hard drive, the absence of an active user account, and the use of virtualization technologies such as usernames, disk space, etc.
Open-sourcing software has been harmful rather than helpful
Open-sourcing your code can provide incredible benefits, including increased visibility into what’s happening inside your application. But when it comes to security, open sourcing can also create problems. Malware writers often leverage existing vulnerabilities to bypass security measures designed to protect against them. And because they know how to find these flaws, they can easily avoid detection tools.
Conclusion
The most important thing here is to correlate all this information together. If you look at each piece of information separately, the evidence for an attack might not appear obvious. With all these pieces of information together, however, they’ll become clearer.
With a thorough knowledge of what normal behavior looks like, organizations can detect some of the most elusive signals of malicious activities. For instance, a single use of a VPN account by an individual who usually uses their own personal laptop would not raise any alarms, but if they were to log into a colleague’s computer using the same account, that would be a clear sign of credential theft.
With enough data, organizations can identify individuals behaving unusually compared to others within their organization. They can then use this information to identify potential Evasive threats before they become an issue for the business. Even if an attacker tries to evade detection by hiding his activities, he may be identified through his behavior patterns.
