BrandPost: How Criminals Abuse Common Security Tools – and Use Them Against You

Criminals are exploiting the very tools used by security teams. Sophos researchers have recently observed an increase in attacks in which criminals target tools used by incident responders and penetration testers. These attacks involve very little or no malware, but instead harness the existing components of the operating system or popular software packages.

“We’ve been seeing this for years, and it’s increasing now,” says Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at Sophos. “It makes sense because we’ve built a robust set of tools for good guys to hack into our networks.”

Now, however, criminals are stealing those same tools and using them to break into systems and steal data. With these types of “living off the land” attacks, criminals use a system’s native tools to launch an attack. Because the tools are commonly used legitimate programs, the attack is often undetectable.

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