An Empirical Assessment of Endpoint Detection and Response Systems against Advanced Persistent Threats Attack Vectors

Abstract

Advanced persistent threats pose a significant challenge for blue teams as they apply various attacks over prolonged periods, impeding event correlation and their detection. In this work, we leverage various diverse attack scenarios to assess the efficacy of EDRs against detecting and preventing APTs. Our results indicate that there is still a lot of room for improvement as state-of-the-art EDRs fail to prevent and log the bulk of the attacks that are reported in this work. Additionally, we discuss methods to tamper with the telemetry providers of EDRs, allowing an adversary to perform a more stealth attack.