🕵️‍♂️ MITRE ATT&CK: Tactic TA0005 Defense Evasion – The Art of Staying Invisible

bharat kumar
Oct 23
2 min read

Updated: Oct 24

Cyber attackers, they no longer sneak into your systems — they live within them, unseen and unnoticed. The MITRE ATT&CK tactic TA0005: Defense Evasion focuses on how adversaries dodge security tools, act legitimate, delete traces, and disguise their activities to stay undetected.

⚙️ Common Evasion Tricks

🧰 Living Off the Land (LOTL): Using built-in tools like PowerShell, certutil, or mshta instead of malware to blend in.
🎭 Masquerading & DLL Side-Loading: Renaming files or loading malicious DLLs through trusted apps.
💾 Fileless Attacks: Running payloads directly in memory to avoid leaving footprints on disk.
🔐 Obfuscation: Encoding or encrypting scripts to bypass scanners.
🧹 Log Tampering: Deleting or altering logs to erase evidence.
🚫 Security Disablement: Turning off antivirus, EDR, or firewalls before executing attacks.
🪪 Abuse of Trust: Using stolen digital certificates or legitimate cloud services to appear safe.

🧨 Recent Trends

Ransomware groups like ALPHV/BlackCat use Rust-based loaders to evade detection.
DLL side-loading remains a favorite in targeted attacks to run code under trusted names.
Fileless techniques are rising — malware now “lives” in memory, avoiding file-based scanning.
Government advisories report growing use of LOLBins, where everyday tools become weapons.

🛡️ How to Defend

🚫 Limit admin privileges: The fewer admins, the fewer ways attackers can hide.
✅ Enable allowlisting: Let only approved apps run on endpoints.
🧱 Patch regularly: Many evasion tricks follow an exploit.
👀 Monitor PowerShell & command-line use: Unusual patterns = red flag.
🧩 Use behavioral EDR: Catch process injection and memory-only payloads.
📜 Centralize logs: Store and protect them so attackers can’t delete history.
🔒 Back up smart: Keep offline or immutable backups in case evasion leads to ransomware.

💡 Final Thoughts

Defense evasion is the hacker’s invisibility cloak. But visibility is power; strong monitoring, behavior-based detection, and smart prevention will strip that cloak away.