We have been talking about eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) for some years now, but despite being a buzzword in the industry, a fundamental question remains: what are we really talking about here? According to Gartner, which first defined the term in 2020, XDR is a vendor-specific threat detection and incident response tool that natively integrates multiple security products into a cohesive security operations system.

While things can sometimes seem “back to normal” in the rest of the world, the devastating war is still going on in Ukraine, affecting millions of innocent civilians. Reflecting on the past year’s suffering of the Ukrainian people, we’d like to summarize the cyber warfare aspect of this conflict. In 2022, Russian government-backed cyberattacks targeted users in Ukraine more than any other country.

IBM have just released their coveted X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023 report, tracking new, existing and evolving threat insights, discovered over the last year. This in-depth, 58-page report explores threat actor’s exploitation of the after-effects of a global pandemic, and the turmoil caused by conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as IBM states “creating exactly the kind of chaos in which cybercriminals thrive. And thrive they did.”.

OAuth (Open Authorization) is a modern, open authorization standard designed to allow cross-application access delegation – for example, allowing your application to read data from your Facebook profile. Combined with the proper extensions, OAuth can also be used for authentication – for example, to log into your application using Google credentials. Since its first introduction in 2006, OAuth has gained tremendous popularity.

Once threat actors gain a foothold on a system, they must implement techniques to maintain that access, even in the event of restarts, updates in credentials or any other type of change that might disrupt access. These techniques are collectively known as persistence techniques. In this blog post, we will focus on how malware can achieve persistence by abusing the Windows Registry.