Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 51 | Page 22

LATEST INTELLIGENCE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE SMARTER APPROACH TO INFORMATION SECURITY TRADITIONAL AV SOLUTIONS ARE NO MATCH FOR TODAY’S SOPHISTICATED ATTACKS. S Single-Use, Highly Targeted Malware Part of the exponential growth of malware, and the bulk of the attacks on various industries, can be attributed to the continued rise in polymorphic and single-use malware. There is a general misconception that publicly available repositories of malware signatures are a complete catalog of in-the-wild malware. PRESENTED BY Download whitepaper here This misguided perception is further elevated by thin endpoint controls that rely on looking up hashes or validating binaries against these public sources to determine if a file is a threat. But, public repositories of signatures are by no means comprehensive, complete, up-to-date, or a reliable record of all the malware that could impact an organization. As a result, the most worrisome malware, from the high-level commodity code to the ultra-sophisticated targeted attacks, will never show up in repositories, making them undetectable to traditional AV solutions. Successful malicious campaigns often remain hidden or dwell for months or even years before components become known. Even at that point, it is often only by a stroke of luck that a file gets uploaded to a public repository, starting the chain of events where it is picked up by other analysts, pivoted upon, and exposed for what it is. n Malicious actors do not want their creations to end up on public malware lists (or otherwise in- the-wild) and frequently take steps to ensure that does not occur. They often use single-use or host/ campaign-specific binaries to remain hidden. It is also well known that attackers take steps to complicate and inhibit analysis of their creations if they are discovered. 22 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com