We had a weird incident last week. Security kept saying the machine was clean. No malware, no alerts, nothing. But someone was clearly messing around on it. Later I hear this term living-off-the-land attack and now I’m wondering how we even missed it.
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Participant
9 months ago
Mar 19, 2025
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Because there was probably nothing “new” to detect. No sketchy files, no random EXEs. They just used whatever was already on the system. PowerShell, schedulers, built-in tools. To most security tools, it looks like normal admin activity.
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Participant
9 months ago
Mar 20, 2025
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Hold on, is that basically the same as fileless malware then? Or is living-off-the-land something different?
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Participant
9 months ago
Mar 21, 2025
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Related, but not the same thing. Fileless just means nothing malicious gets written to disk. Living-off-the-land is more about how they operate. They abuse legit tools the OS already trusts. Most LOTL attacks end up being fileless, but not every fileless attack is living-off-the-land.
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Participant
9 months ago
Mar 24, 2025
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That actually explains a lot. Our logs showed tons of normal commands running, just at really odd hours. We assumed it was automation or someone on-call doing maintenance.
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Participant
9 months ago
Mar 29, 2025
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That’s the scary part. Everything looks fine until you step back and look at behaviour over time. Makes you realize “no alerts” doesn’t really mean “no attack” anymore.
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