Fortinet today announced the findings of its latest quarterly Global Threat Landscape Report. The research reveals that cybercriminals continue to look for new attack opportunities throughout the digital attack surface and are leveraging evasion as well as anti-analysis techniques as they become more sophisticated in their attempts.
The Threat Landscape Index crossed a milestone this quarter. It is up nearly 4% from its original opening position year-over-year. The high point during that year-long timeframe is the peak and closing point of Q2 CY2019. The upsurge was driven by increased malware and exploit activity.
“The ever-widening breadth and sophistication of cyber adversaries’ attack methods is an important reminder of how they are attempting to leverage speed and connectivity to their advantage”, said Phil Quade, Chief Information Security Officer, Fortinet. “Therefore, it is important for defenders to do the same and to relentlessly prioritize these important cybersecurity fundamentals, to position organisations to better manage and mitigate cyber risks. A security fabric approach across every security element that embraces segmentation and integration, actionable threat intelligence, and automation combined with machine learning is essential to enable these fundamentals to bear fruit.”
According to the report, many modern malware tools already incorporate features for evading antivirus or other threat detection measures, but cyber adversaries are becoming more sophisticated in their obfuscation and anti-analysis practices to avoid detection.
For example, a spam campaign demonstrates how adversaries are using and tweaking these techniques against defenders. The campaign involves the use of a phishing email with an attachment that turned out to be a weaponized Excel document with a malicious macro. The macro has attributes designed to disable security tools, execute commands arbitrarily, cause memory problems, and ensure that it only runs on Japanese systems. One property that it looks for in particular, an xlDate variable, seems to be undocumented.
Another example involves a variant of the Dridexbanking trojan which changes the names and hashes of files each time the victim logs in, making it difficult to spot the malware on infected host systems.
The growing use of anti-analysis and broader evasion tactics is a reminder of the need for multi-layered defenses and behavior-based threat detection.
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