Experts pay attention to the growing popularity of cyberattacks in which the malware file is absent as such. These techniques are commonly called fileless.
Fileless attacks last year accounted for 51% of all cybercrime campaigns. And in 2020, their share was only 40%.
According to researchers from CrowdStrike, cybercriminals increasingly rely on stolen credentials to try to penetrate a corporation's network.
These methods are used by Chinese and North Korean cybercriminals who aim to steal trade secrets and intellectual property. The most frequent victims of such attacks are companies from North America, where 74% of intrusions were recorded without malware.
According to the Global Threat Report 2021, CrowdStrike experts analyzed cyberattacks in 176 countries, among which were allegedly government-sponsored operations. According to experts, the absence of malware files in cybercrime campaigns negates antivirus tools as a primary protective measure.
Fileless attacks are those attacks in which fragments of the malware are not written to the victim's disk. Malicious code can run in memory, making it difficult to detect on the system.
Operations in which attackers use compromised credentials for remote access also fall into this category.
