Living Off the Land: What We Learned from 700,000 Security Incidents
May 19, 2025
While emerging risks like AI-generated malware capture headlines, the reality of today's threat landscape is more straightforward. Most modern attacks, including ransomware, are backed by manual hacking operations. Attackers carefully navigate systems, using a "Living Off the Land" (LOTL) approach, to exploit legitimate system utilities. To figure out exactly how common these LOTL binaries are, we analyzed 700,000 security incidents from our Bitdefender GravityZone platform along with telemetry data (legitimate usage) from the last 90 days. Security incidents were not simple alerts, but correlated events, and we analyzed the whole chain of commands to identify how frequently attackers are using LOTL binaries. The result? 84% of major attacks (incidents with high severity) involved the use of LOTL binaries. For validation, we also examined our MDR data and found a consistent trend: 85% of incidents involved LOTL techniques. While this was our internal research to suppor...
