Moving Target Defense Blog

The term “new normal” means different things to different people. For some, the term is synonymous with a return to the office (just with a few tweaks), while others think that co-located teams are gone for good. The reality is probably somewhere in between. Household names like Google and Facebook are planning for a future where most of their employees work remotely most of the time. And where big tech goes, other organizations tend to follow.

In the ongoing war over cybersecurity, endpoints seemed like settled territory. After years of surrounding these vulnerable vectors with defensive technologies and company-wide IT hygiene best practices, it became easy to assume the endpoints were ironclad. Unfortunately, the latest generation of emerging threats handily circumvents and, in many cases, obliterates existing endpoint security defenses.

Google, SpaceX, and even NASA, recently banning employee use of Zoom as they shift to work-from-home workforces in response to COVID-19 have shined a spotlight on the widely popular video conferencing tool’s security flaws. While “ZoomBombing” trolls can certainly be embarrassing, those types of breaches are only a harbinger for more sophisticated ransomware, zero-day attacks, and malware that can be carried out targeting Zoom’s current weaknesses.

We’re in the middle of a shift between on-premises server workloads and cloud workloads. The shift started around 10 years ago and will likely continue for the next two decades. After the past decade of cloud adoption, according to 451 Research, 90 percent of all organizations are using cloud technology and 60 percent of all IT workloads are conducted in the cloud.

Antivirus protection is a baseline cost of doing business for the modern organization. At first, companies and governments only needed signature-based antivirus that tracked known malware. As fileless malware and exploits accelerated, next-gen antivirus that leveraged AI and behavioral analysis came on the scene to respond.

Last week, Intezer and IBM X-Force released new research identifying a new form of ransomware, which they named PureLocker. Written in PureBasic and designed to attack servers, this damaging new malware has been described as Malware-as-a-Service in a recent ZDNet article.