eSentire Threat Intelligence Spotlight: The Shifting Framework of Modern Malware

Modern malware is increasingly sophisticated. While newer antivirus solutions provide a more effective layer of detection than their predecessors, threats can and do break through. Plus, the operational reality is that attack windows continually exist, providing opportunities for malicious actors to initiate and accelerate campaigns.

While organizations can partially mitigate some risk factors, others are completely unavoidable and must simply be accepted as a consequence of growth.

Unfortunately, digital transformation and the evolution of security technology has created confusion in the marketplace. What solutions do organizations need to mitigate endpoint risk?

Modern and evolving threats can readily bypass legacy antivirus solutions and take advantage of attack windows. Organizations need solutions that can harden endpoints, prevent polymorphic malware and fileless attacks, mitigate code execution associated with malicious activities and provide investigation and remediation capabilities with dynamic response to security incidents.

With modern malware becoming increasingly sophisticated, to celebrate the start of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the United States and Canada, eSentire and Carbon Black commissioned a new Threat Intelligence Spotlight exploring the topic. This new report is designed to be a resource that can be used by anyone, regardless of their technical knowledge, to understand how malware works, and more importantly how to protect your organization from suffering a malware-realated incident.

eSentire’s Threat Intelligence Spotlight: The Shifting Framework of Modern Malware draws on data gathered from both Carbon Black’s extensive endpoint protection install base and the more than 650 mid-sized organizations that eSentire protects. Analysis of this data by security analysts at both companies reveals interesting findings, which include:

• The median number of variants within a malware family is around 10, which begins to highlight the challenges faced by traditional endpoint solutions—and the largest number of variants within a family is more than 200
• It takes nearly 40 hours forthe majority of legacy antivirus engines to detect some new forms of malware
• New variants ofEmotet, a major malware family that recently returned after a four month hiatus, can spread to unprotected hosts on the same network in under 12 seconds
• Over two-thirds (67%) of all malware enters an organization via email

Download the full report here: https://esentire.com/resource-library/esentire-malware-report

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

eSentire Threat Intel Threat Intelligence Research Group