Despite Government Disruption, LockBit Dominated Incident Response Cases in First Half of 2024

OXFORD, U.K. — Diciembre 12, 2024 —

Sophos, a global leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, today released “The Bite from Inside: The Sophos Active Adversary Report,” an in-depth look at the changing behaviors and attack techniques that adversaries used in the first half of 2024. The data, derived from nearly 200 incident response (IR) cases from across both the Sophos X-Ops IR team and Sophos X-Ops Managed Detection and Response (MDR) team, found that attackers are leveraging trusted applications and tools on Windows systems, commonly called “living off the land” binaries, to conduct discovery on systems and maintain persistence. When compared to 2023, Sophos saw a 51% increase in abusing “Living off the Land” binaries or LOLbins; since 2021, it’s increased by 83%.

Among the 187 unique Microsoft LOLbins detected in the first half of the year, the most frequently abused trusted application was remote desktop protocol (RDP). Of the nearly 200 IR cases analyzed, attackers abused RDP in 89% of them. This dominance continues a trend first observed in the 2023 Active Adversary report in which RDP abuse was prevalent in 90% of all IR cases investigated.

“Living-off-the-land not only offers stealth to an attacker's activities but also provides a tacit endorsement of their activities. While abusing some legitimate tools might raise a few defenders’ eyebrows, and hopefully some alerts, abusing a Microsoft binary often has the opposite effect. Many of these abused Microsoft tools are integral to Windows and have legitimate uses, but it’s up to system administrators to understand how they are used in their environments and what constitutes abuse. Without nuanced and contextual awareness of the environment, including continuous vigilance to new and developing events within the network, today's stretched IT teams risk missing key threat activity that often leads to ransomware,” says John Shier, field CTO, Sophos.

In addition, the report found that, despite the government disruption of LockBit’s main leak website and infrastructure in February, LockBit was the most frequently encountered ransomware group, accounting for approximately 21% of infections in the first half of 2024.

Other key findings from the latest Active Adversary Report:

  • Root Cause of Attacks: Continuing a trend first noted in the Active Adversary Report for Tech Leaders, compromised credentials are still the number one root cause of attacks, accounting for the root cause in 39% of cases. This is, however, a decline from the 56% noted in 2023
  • Network Breaches Dominate for MDR: When examining solely the cases from the Sophos MDR team, network breaches were the dominant incident the team encountered
  • Dwell Times Are Shorter for MDR Teams: For cases from the Sophos IR team, dwell time (the time from when an attack starts to when it’s detected) has remained approximately eight days. However, with MDR, the median dwell time is just one day for all types of incidents and only three days for ransomware attacks
  • The Most Frequently Compromised Active Directory Servers Are Nearing End of Life: Attackers most frequently compromised the 2019, 2016, and 2012 server versions of Active Directory (AD). All three of these versions are now out of mainstream Microsoft support—one step before they become end-of-life (EOL) and impossible to patch without paid support from Microsoft. In addition, a full 21% of the AD server versions compromised were already EOL

To learn more about attacker behaviors, tools and techniques, read “The Bite from Inside: The Sophos Active Adversary Report,” on Sophos.com.

Acerca de Sophos

Sophos es una empresa innovadora y líder global de soluciones de seguridad avanzadas para combatir los ciberataques, entre las que se incluyen servicios de detección y respuesta gestionadas (MDR) y de respuesta a incidentes y un amplio catálogo de tecnologías para la protección de endpoints, redes, el correo electrónico y la nube. Como uno de los mayores proveedores especializados en ciberseguridad, Sophos protege a más de 600 000 organizaciones y a más de 100 millones de usuarios de todo el mundo frente a adversarios activos, ransomware, phishing, malware y mucho más. Los servicios y productos de Sophos se conectan a través de la consola de administración de Sophos Central y utilizan Sophos X-Ops, la unidad de información sobre amenazas multidominio de la empresa. La información de Sophos X-Ops optimiza todo el Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, que incluye un lago de datos centralizado que se sirve de un completo conjunto de API abiertas disponibles para clientes, partners, desarrolladores y otros proveedores de ciberseguridad y de tecnología de la información. Para las organizaciones que necesitan soluciones de seguridad totalmente gestionadas, Sophos ofrece la ciberseguridad como servicio. Aunque los clientes también pueden gestionar su ciberseguridad directamente mediante la plataforma de operaciones de seguridad de Sophos o utilizar un enfoque híbrido reforzando sus equipos internos con los servicios de Sophos, que incluyen la búsqueda y remediación de amenazas. Sophos vende a través de partners distribuidores y proveedores de servicios gestionados (MSP) en todo el mundo. Sophos tiene su sede en Oxford, Reino Unido. Encontrará más información en es.sophos.com.