Cyber security firm Fortinet came out with the findings of its latest quarterly Global Threat Landscape Report, which brought out that cybercriminals continue to look for new attack opportunities throughout the digital attack surface and are leveraging evasion as well as anti-analysis techniques as they become more sophisticated in their attempts. The study highlighted that the Threat Landscape Index crossed a milestone this quarter as it is up nearly 4% from its original opening position year-over-year. The high point during that year-long timeframe is the peak and closing point of Q2 CY2019. The upsurge was driven by increased malware and exploit activity, the report said. It said many modern malware tools already incorporate features for evading antivirus or other threat detection measures, but cyber adversaries are becoming more sophisticated in their obfuscation and anti-analysis practices to avoid detection. For example, a spam campaign demonstrates how adversaries are using and tweaking these techniques against defenders. The campaign involves the use of a phishing email with an attachment that turned out to be a weaponized Excel document with a malicious macro. The macro has attributes designed to disable security tools, execute commands arbitrarily, cause memory problems, and ensure that it only runs on Japanese systems. Another example involves a variant of the Dridex banking trojan which changes the names and hashes of files each time the victim logs in, making it difficult to spot the malware on infected host systems.
