13 November 2017

Cyber Kill Chain

Anti-Virus (AV) protection works fine if the attacker uses a well-known malware, e.g. Locky, or one of its variants. In this case, the AV scan engine computes the fingerprint of the malicious object and checks it against its fingerprint database. Since a fingerprint is available, the attack is stopped in the delivery phase of a cyber attack the latest.

In the case of the AutoIt Overlay Malware the attacker hides the pattern in an AutoIt script which results in a modified fingerprint. Since this fingerprint is not known in the database the AV scan engine cannot stop the attack. For details about the AutoIt Overlay Malware see this excellent report by Gadi Ostrovsky published on November 8, 2017 in the IBM Security Intelligence blog

Anti-Virus evasion techniques are well known for years. Thus companies are well advised to rely not only on an anti-malware system in their endpoint protection strategy.

My favorite add-on to Anti-Malware systems is still Blue Ridge Networks AppGuard because its available for consumers as well as for businesses. AppGuard would block the AutoIt Overlay Malware during the installation phase the latest because it just blocks the execution of whatever objects from inside a user’s home directory.

Have a great week.