Modern Threat Landscape

Threat evolution from malware shows a continuing strong trend from disruptive to criminal, featuring commercial quality cybercrime toolkits for the attacker. Modern advanced malware has an infection lifecycle. It’s no longer the case that an exploit of a system leads to just one infection. The attacker’s goal is long term control over the system – owning the system. Once a system is exploited, a multi-stage infection cycle begins in which dozens of malware infections are installed. Multiple infections help to ensure enduring control by the cyber criminal. To effectively stop the infection a solution must address the entire lifecycle – initial exploitation, subsequent downloads, and ongoing malware outbound callbacks.

There is one illustration below: