DeepSec 2021 Talk: Hunting for LoLs (a ML Living of the Land Classifier) – Tiberiu Boros, Andrei Cotaie

Sanna/ August 25, 2021/ Conference

Living of the Land is not a brand-new concept. The knowledge and resources have been out there for several years now. Still, LoL is one of the preferred approaches when we are speaking about highly skilled attackers or security professionals. There are two main reasons for this: Experts tend not to reinvent the wheel Attackers like to keep a low profile/footprint (no random binaries/scripts on the disk) This talk focuses on detecting attacker activity/Living of the Land commands using Machine Learning, for both Linux and Windows systems. Most of the AV vendors do not treat the command itself (from a syntax and vocabulary perspective) as an attack vector. And most of the log-based alerts are static, have a limited specter and are hard to update. Furthermore, classic LoL detection mechanisms are noisy and somewhat

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