Whether you’re a small business operating out of a single office or a global enterprise with a huge and distributed corporate network, not inspecting the encrypted traffic entering and leaving can be a costly mistake, as cybercriminals are increasingly using TLS (Transport Layer Security) in their attacks.
Case in point: in Q1 2020, 23 percent of malware detected by Sophos used TLS to disguise malicious communications. Only a year later, that percentage has nearly doubled (45%)!
TLS encryption: For better and for worse
The widespread use of TLS encryption prevents criminals to steal or tamper with sensitive data and to impersonate legitimate organizations online. Unfortunately, it can also allow malware to fly under the radar and hide from enterprise IT security teams and the tools they use.
“A large portion of the growth in overall TLS use by malware can be linked in part to the increased use of legitimate web and cloud services protected by TLS—such as Discord, Pastebin, Github and Google’s cloud services—as repositories for malware components, as destinations for stolen data, and even to send commands to botnets and other malware,” noted Sean Gallagher, Senior Threat Researcher at Sophos.
“It is also linked to the increased use of Tor and other TLS-based network proxies to encapsulate malicious communications between malware and the actors deploying them.”
The company has also witnessed an increase in TLS use in manually deployed ransomware attacks, partly because the attackers use modular offensive tools (e.g., Metasploit, Cobalt Strike) that leverage HTTPS.
