"Malware-Free Cyberattacks Are on the Rise; Here's How to Detect Them"

According to George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, and Michael Sentonas, president of the company, 71 percent of enterprise cyberattacks in 2022 were conducted without malware. At this year's RSA Conference, Kurtz and Sentonas walked the audience through a case study of how easily a threat actor can not only penetrate a network but also move laterally and remain undetected, showing the difficulty cybersecurity teams face when attempting to detect malwareless compromises. They detailed the "Spider" cybercrime group as a prime example of the phenomenon. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and other malware detection technologies are not particularly useful for defending the enterprise against malware-free cyberattacks as there is no malicious code to detect. Instead, organizations are advised to focus on collecting as much telemetry as possible from the endpoint to the cloud and managing identity to the smallest details. However, after collecting all of this telemetry and identity data, teams are left with enormous amounts of information that are not particularly useful for threat hunting. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can be applied effectively to search for anomalous activity, such as newly created user accounts, to detect malicious activity without malicious code. This article continues to discuss the rise in malware-free cyberattacks and how to detect them. 

Dark Reading reports "Malware-Free Cyberattacks Are on the Rise; Here's How to Detect Them"