Infostealer Malware 101: mitigating risks and strengthening defenses against this insidious threat. [CyberWire-X]

With the relentless advancements in technology and a workforce more digitally-enabled than ever before, businesses today face an unprecedented challenge of protecting their sensitive information from cybercriminals. Infostealer malware, often disguised as innocuous files or hidden within legitimate-looking emails, stealthily infiltrate employee and contractor devices – managed and unmanaged – exfiltrating all manner of data for the purposes of executing follow-on attacks including ransomware. The data at risk includes customer details, financial information, intellectual property, and R&D plans stolen from compromised applications that were accessed from infostealer-exfiltrated authentication data like credentials and active session cookies/tokens. This episode digs into the proliferation of infostealers and provides actionable steps for businesses of any size or industry to mitigate the threat. In this episode of CyberWire-X, N2K’s CSO, Chief Analyst, and Senior Fellow, Rick Howard, is joined in the first half by Hash Table member Rick Doten to discuss the early days of incident response and the current thinking of post-infection remediation (PIR) actions. In the second half of the show, CyberWire podcast host Dave Bittner talks with our episode sponsor SpyCloud’s Director of Security Research, Trevor Hilligoss. They chat about the challenges for enterprises and security leaders to identify what was stolen from malware-infected devices and how proper post-infection remediation implemented into existing incident response workflows can help prevent this data from causing ransomware. Trevor shares highlights from an industry report of over 300+ security leaders from North America and the UK on where they stand on malware identification and remediation, and what additional work can be done to minimize cybercriminals' access and impact.