Adventures in the Underland: Uncommon Hacker’s Persistence Methods and Countermeasures

Persistence is one of the main aspects that hackers pay special attention to during the malware development and during the attack phase. The goal is very simple: to be as stealth as possible. Usually, attackers aim to maintain the presence in the target’s network by installing malware on various workstations and servers. However, the main challenge for them is that the malicious code needs to be available also after reboot, so the best solution would be to put it in a place that most monitoring tools will not discover. Sneaky, right? And when this persistence finally pays off, ransomware begins to act and problems arise. Since there are so many places on Windows to hide even from the best monitoring tools, it would be great to become familiar with at least some of them, especially the uncommon ones! During this session, Paula will demonstrate several less common persistence methods we should all be aware of. All the stories and scenarios presented during the demonstration are taken from real life, so don’t miss it and leave with suggestions & ideas on how to reach the next level of security in your workspaces.