Security News > 2021 > March > Years-old MS Office, Word flaws most exploited to deliver malware

88% of malware was delivered by email into users' inboxes, in many cases having bypassed gateway filters.

Delivery-themed lures tempting users into letting the RATs in: A new Office malware builder called APOMacroSploit was used to target victims in delivery-themed spam campaigns, tricking them into opening weaponized XLS attachments, ultimately leading to the BitRAT remote access Trojan being deployed on their computers.

"We have also seen threat actors continue to experiment with malware delivery techniques to improve their chances of establishing footholds into networks. The most effective execution techniques we saw in Q4 2020 involved old technologies like Excel 4.0 macros that often offer little visibility to detection tools."

Other key findings Trojans made up 66% of malware samples analyzed, driven largely by malicious spam campaigns distributing Dridex malware, which a recent HP blog flagged as having increased in prevalence by 239%. 88% of malware detected was delivered via email - with the most common lures being fake invoice attachments - while web downloads were responsible for the remaining 12%. The most common type of malicious attachments were: documents, archive files, spreadsheets and executable files.

A 12% growth in malware that exploits CVE-2017-0199, which is commonly used to run malicious scripts to deploy malware when a user opens an Office document.

"The best cyber defense is being able to isolate risks on the endpoint through micro-virtualization. This kind of hardware-enforced isolation removes the opportunity for malware to cause harm to the host PC - even from novel malware - because it does not rely on a detect-to-protect security model."

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