A joint cybersecurity advisory released on September 1st detailed technical methods for uncovering and responding to malicious activity including best practice mitigations and common missteps. A collaborative effort, this advisory (coded AA20-245A) is the product of research from the cybersecurity organizations of five nations.

Last month, members of the Elastic Security team hosted a threat hunting capture the flag (CTF) event at BSides SATX. We provided the community with an environment to learn and practice threat hunting with our team, and cultivated new relationships with attendees. By sharing information with security practitioners, we can help prepare them to defend their organization’s data from attack through knowledge transfer.

The process of threat hunting involves proactively searching for malware or attackers that are hiding within a network. Rather than simply relying on security solutions or services to detect threats, threat hunting is a predictive element to a layered security strategy, empowering organizations to go on the offensive looking for threats.

In Part 2 of this two-part series, our goal is to provide security practitioners with better visibility, knowledge, and capabilities relative to malicious persistence techniques that impact organizations around the world every day. In this post, we’ll explore two additional persistence techniques that are being used by attackers in the wild: Scheduled Tasks (T1053) and BITS Jobs (T1197).

The FBI recently reported that in 2019, cybercrime cost businesses $3.5 billion, a number they say is likely grossly underestimated. Another study from Accenture that spanned 11 countries across 16 industries found that the complexity of attacks is also increasing. As a result, the average cost of cybercrime for an organization grew from $1.4 million to $13.0 million.