Unknown Attacks and Unknown Attackers

How to Stop Them - “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle,” Sun Tzu, the Art of War.

Current cyberattacks have become sophisticated and diversified, targeting both information and social systems. Recent data breaches also caused more significant damage than ever before, with an average cost of $3.86 million. Organizations are responding to such issues by developing and implementing systems and products that address known threats. When security tools detect malicious activities, they isolate and block the traffic to prevent data breaches.

Incredibly, many businesses, even those that handle client payment information, believe they are not at high risk of cyberattacks. Some business owners think that simply installing antivirus software and other legacy data protection tools will be enough to protect them from threats.

Attackers understand that existing cybersecurity solutions respond primarily to familiar threats. Such signature-based anti-malware tools are not effective in preventing emerging threats. Criminal hackers are constantly devising new tactics and malware variants that information security (infosec) teams have not detected before. With millions of variants being deployed continuously, unknown threats are exploding – which makes it a challenge for the industry to maintain a comprehensive, up-to-date security database of signatures.

What are some of the unknown attacks and unknown attackers?

1. Recycled Threats

Attackers consider recycled threats to be cost-effective exploit tactics. They use previously proven methods to target enterprises. Recycled threats remain unknown to organizations due to the limited memory in security products. Typically, infosec teams and tools choose to only protect against the most recent threats, hoping this will safeguard information from all attacks – even though their security operation center does not track older threats. If a cybercriminal recycles an exploit, they bypass controls where such organizations do not categorize old exploits as something flagged as malicious before.

2. Modifying Malware

Attackers can manually or automatically modify code in existing threats to create polymorphic malware that evades detection by security tools. Since solutions such as firewalls, anti-malware, and intrusion detection systems detect and respond to a prevalent threat, a slight modification to the code turns the malware into an unknown threat.

Today, hackers create a strain of malware and generate forks of the initial version to introduce several variations. The attacks can, therefore, pass through legacy signature-based security tools without sounding the alarm.

3. New Threats

Cybercriminal groups and state threat actors are determined and willing to invest in creating new threats with unknown codes. Apart from modifying existing malware signatures to exploit flaws in new technologies, cybercriminals also explore unique characteristics in legacy systems to find loopholes and inject new malware. Attackers are taking advantage of new technologies, such as the current social media craze, cloud computing and smartphones, to launch new campaigns which extract cash from victims.

What can organizations do to detect and mitigate
unknown threats and attackers?

Detecting and Responding to Unknown Attacks and Attackers

Historically, cybersecurity vendors have built their offerings to predominantly to detect and respond to known threats. They analyze network traffic and logs to identify and block malicious activities based on what they have seen before. However, today’s business needs an effective information security strategy that can detect and prevent successful data breaches from both known and unknown bad actors and threat vectors.

Ultimately, enterprises can defend against unknown malicious activities by implementing automated information security and intelligence technology. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based products can monitor network traffic and detect malicious behavior in real-time to curb cyberattacks. Unlike legacy signature based technologies, AI-driven solutions can leverage massive threat datasets to measurably enhance and fortify cybersecurity postures.

Securus360 AI-Driven Detection and Response Services

Securus360 AI-Driven Detection and Response Services Securus360 provides an all-encompassing network monitoring solution that offers the industry’s most effective, fully integrated platform for delivering visibility across the entire infrastructure of a business. This helps eliminate the current blind spot so many companies have today: the inability to identify, contain and eliminate threats from unknown attacks and unknown attackers.

Securus360 eliminates this blind spot. The company utilizes an award-winning, AI-driven, cloud-native approach that combines machine learning, security automation and human intelligence to create a high-speed and high-touch cyber defense solution that proactively detects and responds to prevalent, emerging and unknown threats before they can impact an organization.

Securus360 offers a Managed eXtended Detection & Response solution that provides an all-inclusive network security monitoring platform delivering threat visibility across the entire infrastructure of a company, including servers, endpoints, network infrastructure, cloud instances, and end user behavior, all on a single pane of glass.