OPSWAT, a leading provider of critical infrastructure protection, recently released its first-ever Threat Landscape Report at Black Hat USA, revealing key insights from over 890,000 sandbox scans in the last 12 months.
According to OPSWAT, the report offers a unique lens into the evolving nature of cyberthreats, with findings that include:
- Traditional detection methods are being outpaced, with a 127 percent rise in multi-stage malware complexity.
- 1 in 14 files initially deemed ‘safe’ by legacy systems have proven to be malicious. These include layered threats designed to evade analysis, including obfuscated loaders such as NetReactor and evasive behaviors missed by traditional tools. These results show that modern malware intends to confuse, not flood.
- OPSWAT’s behavioral and machine learning pipeline, aided by a newly enhanced PE emulator, was able to identify threats that included clipboard hijacking via ClickFix, steganography-wrapped loaders, C2 channels embedded in Google services and .NET bitmap malware loaders delivering Snake Keylogger payloads.
The report adds that “as critical infrastructure, government systems, and enterprise networks face growing targeting from increasingly modular and evasive malware, the findings of this report spotlight the evolving adversary playbook and the need for integrated, multilayered solutions.
“Cybersecurity leaders must now prioritize adaptability, shared intelligence, reassessing technology, and fast behavioral detection pipelines to protect systems from known threats, but also to keep pace with a rapidly evolving threat landscape and whatever is on the horizon.”
Click to download the full report here.