Research in 2017 found that nearly 80% of successful cyber attacks utilized fileless methods, which are being increasingly deployed. The study explored the evolution of cyber attacks and the ways organizations are adapting to them. More than 600 IT security professionals were surveyed to arrive at the statistics that will be cited below.

The survey revealed that 70% of organizations observed a large increase in endpoint security risk in the past year. This increase corresponded with the growth of fileless attacks.

Fileless Attack Basics

Fileless attacks utilize scripts, exploits, and legitimate system administration tools rather than malicious executable files, which can be detected and blocked by antivirus solutions.

Nowadays, the most common cyber attacks that are successfully compromising organizations are deploy exploits with the intent to run malicious code or launch scripts directly from memory. These fileless methods can infect endpoints while not leaving artifacts that would be easily detectable.

After compromising an endpoint, an attack can also abuse what otherwise would be legitimate processes and system administration tools to attain persistence, elevate privileges, and laterally expand throughout the network.

Projections

The survey respondents estimated that 29% of the cyber attacks they suffered in 2017 were fileless, which was an increase of 20% from the previous year. In addition, they expect occurrences of fileless attacks to continue to grow this year, estimating they will amount to 35% of cyber attacks by the end of 2018.

Although this growth is notable, it should not be surprising because fileless attacks have been proven to be effective. The research study’s survey revealed that 42% of organizations suffered at least one fileless attack in 2017 that compromised their IT infrastructure or data. To hammer home the gravity of this threat, more than 75% of successful compromises utilized fileless methods.

Part 2 will discuss Antivirus Solutions Augmented and Five Methods for Reducing Vulnerability.

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