As security measures get better at detecting and blocking both malware and cyberattacks, adversaries and cybercriminals are forced to constantly develop new techniques to evade detection. One of these advanced techniques involves "fileless" exploits, where no executable file is written to disk. These attacks are particularly effective at evading traditional antivirus (AV) solutions, which look for files saved to disk so they can scan them and determine if they are malicious.

While fileless attacks are not new, they are becoming more prevalent. In their 2016 investigations, the CrowdStrike® Services incident response teams found that eight out of 10 attack vectors that resulted in a successful breach used fileless attack techniques. To help you understand the risk posed by fileless attacks, this white paper explains how fileless attacks work, why current solutions are powerless against them, and CrowdStrike’s proven approach for solving this challenge.