Adversaries accelerating targeted access to critical networks

CrowdStrike, a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint and workload protection, has announced the release of the CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch annual report: Nowhere To Hide, 2021 Threat Hunting Report: Insights from the CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch Team.

The report highlights an explosion in adversary activity, both in volume and velocity. CrowdStrike’s threat hunters tracked a 60% increase in attempted intrusions spanning all industry verticals and geographic regions. 

The report is comprised of threat data from Falcon OverWatch, CrowdStrike’s industry-leading managed threat hunting team, with contributions from CrowdStrike Intelligence and Services Teams, and provides an inside look at the current threat landscape, notable adversary behavior and tactics and recommendations to increase cyber-resiliency.

In the 2021 report, CrowdStrike’s threat hunters directly identified and helped to disrupt more than 65,000 potential intrusions – approximately one potential intrusion every eight minutes.

The report also showcases a significant drop in average breakout time – the time it takes for an intruder to begin moving laterally outside of the initial beachhead to other systems in the network – of just one hour 32 minutes, a threefold decrease from 2020.

These sobering statistics show how threat actors are constantly adapting tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to accelerate their march towards their objectives. 

Additional significant OverWatch observations include:

• Adversaries have moved beyond malware. They are using increasingly sophisticated and stealthy techniques tailor-made to evade detections – of all the detections indexed by CrowdStrike Threat Graph in the past three months, 68% were malware-free.

• China, North Korea and Iran were the most active state-sponsored groups.

• A massive surge in interactive intrusion activity targeting the telecommunications industry. This activity spans all major geographic regions and has been tied to a diverse range of adversaries.

• WIZARD SPIDER was the most prolific cybercriminal group. In fact, this group was seen in nearly double the number of attempted intrusions than any other eCrime group.

• A 100% increase in instances of cryptojacking. 

• Access Brokers had a banner year. eCrime actors who specialize in breaching networks to sell that access to others played a growing and important role for other eCrime actors to stage their attempted intrusions.

“Over the past year, businesses faced an unprecedented onslaught of sophisticated attacks on a daily basis. Falcon OverWatch has the unparalleled ability to see and stop the most complex threats – leaving adversaries with nowhere to hide,” said Param Singh, Vice President of Falcon OverWatch, CrowdStrike.

“In order to thwart modern adversaries’ stealthy and unabashed tactics and techniques, it’s imperative that organizations incorporate both expert threat hunting and threat intelligence into their security stacks, layer Machine Learning enabled Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) into their networks and have comprehensive visibility into endpoints to ultimately stop adversaries in their tracks.”