The job for CIOs, CISOs and their security and IT teams may be more complex than ever in 2022. Ongoing support for hybrid workforces, coupled with the continued shift to the cloud, has expanded the threat surface. At the same time, the infrastructure and environments supporting organizations are growing ever more vulnerable. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), more than 18,000 vulnerabilities were reported in 2021.

Migrating to the cloud has allowed many organizations to reduce costs, innovate faster and deliver business results more effectively. However, as businesses expand their cloud investments, they must adapt their security strategies to stay one step ahead of threats that target their expanded environment. Managing, securing and having visibility across endpoints, networks and workloads is not an easy feat. It requires a unified defense-in-depth approach.

Access brokers have become a key component of the eCrime threat landscape, selling access to threat actors and facilitating myriad criminal activities. Many have established relationships with big game hunting (BGH) ransomware operators and affiliates of prolific ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) programs.

Adversaries are becoming more adept and sophisticated in their attacks. Taking advantage of vulnerabilities present in major software is often an attractive entry point for establishing a campaign within an enterprise environment. The CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report highlights how adversaries continue to shift tradecraft and weaponize vulnerabilities to evade detection and gain access to critical applications and infrastructure.

As technology continues to evolve rapidly, so do the techniques used by adversaries. This may be considered a given, but it is important to appreciate how attackers may leverage existing and commonly used applications within an environment to attempt to seize control and achieve their objectives.

Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions deliver powerful capabilities to help security teams fight adversaries by increasing visibility, simplifying operations and accelerating identification and remediation across the security stack. XDR platforms gather and aggregate security data from a variety of sources to help detect and contain advanced attacks. But when it comes to efficiently analyzing threat data and quickly identifying the root cause of an incident, not all XDR solutions are alike.

CrowdStrike continues to support coverage of MITRE, first through the MITRE ATT&CK® framework and now with the latest findings from the MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense (CTID). Today MITRE CTID released a report examining threat trends and patterns frequently used by malicious insiders to exfiltrate data, access confidential information and commit fraud.

Adversaries are moving beyond malware and becoming more sophisticated in their attacks by using legitimate credentials and built-in tools to evade detection by traditional antivirus products. According to the CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report, 62% of detections indexed by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud in Q4 2021 were malware-free.