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What Are The Best Methods to Detect Malicious Activity?

Aug 12, 2021

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Three words of interest relating to malicious activity are; malware, malicious threat actors, and malicious activity. What do these bizarre-sounding terms pertain to and why do they exist? Simply put, these are cybersecurity terms that are very important and very often referenced in the cybersecurity community. First of all, malicious activity brings up several keywords such as; intrusion detection, malware, network traffic, and insider threats. This is all relevant because malicious activity relates to cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks are orchestrated by cybercriminals who lurk in the digital realm (online.) A malicious activity means any unauthorized breach of network traffic or system processes on any connected system or device. Secondly, malicious threat actors (mostly referred to as hackers) are those that perpetuate the above mentioned malicious activity via various attack surfaces and vectors and are looking for financial gain, for the most part (sometimes political gain or blackmail.) Malicious actors differ vastly in sophistication, attach technique, and whether they belong to a large malicious cybercriminal group or not. And thirdly, malware. This is a big one. Malware, when deconstructed, contains the words malicious and software. Now, there are hundreds of types of malicious software. Cybercriminals use a wide malware arsenal as their tool of choice, some of which are either custom-made (custom coded) or downloaded as a ready-made package from the internet (for free or at a cost.)

Since cybercriminals have so many nasty tools at their disposal, it is important to understand that detecting viruses or malware can be tricky for even the most seasoned cybersecurity teams. For this reason, it is important to look at how to detect the malicious activity of various kinds on various platforms meant for various uses, and ideally, stop it in its tracks. Avoiding damage to brand reputation, financial losses, data corruption, identity theft, system downtime, and a slew of other awful incidents is possible through good knowledge of network cybersecurity. Evidence of what malicious activity can do is everywhere. It causes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage to the world economy every year (and is getting worse) as well as being the sole reason why smaller businesses without big cybersecurity budgets can disappear off the map in the blink of an eye.

What is Malicious Activity?


For any organization out there that has anything to do with the internet e.g. using it to communicate with employees or for company data storage (which most do nowadays), it is paramount that this organization understands what malicious activity is to avoid the headaches. It is almost absolutely certain that every organization in the digital realm will be faced with some sort of cybersecurity incident pertaining to malicious activity. As the digital transformation comes into full force, malicious threat actors know how to use shifting technological paradigms to escalate and mold the threat landscape they create.

Malicious activity can come in several forms, especially from an enterprise (organizational) point of view;

  • Strange network behavior

  • Network anomalies

  • System downtime

  • Problems with network traffic flow

  • The exploitation of vulnerabilities in the system

  • DDoS (denial of service) attacks

  • Full data breach and system compromise


How to Best Detect And Prevent Malicious Activity


It is important to understand that strict cybersecurity should be a staple for any proper organization out there. This means that personnel should be alarmed even at the slightest sniff of even suspicious network activity. Now, there are several best practices, tools, products, and services via which malicious activity can be brought to a standstill (mostly.) All of these means are available to any organization out there, although sometimes these solutions come at a price. These solutions also mean an organization needs to spend resources like time, but it is more than worth it in the long run. Some of these are network security tools such as;

  • DLP data protection

  • SIEMs

  • IPS systems

  • NBAD anomaly detection


A DLP data protection system is there to protect data, especially sensitive data in an organization. Secondly, An IPS system can protect network security by completely blocking malicious activity on the network side. Thirdly, an NBAD anomaly detection system looks specifically at unusual behavior on the network, like cross-checking strange network behavior and anomalies with common information. Finally, a complete solution to all of this is a SIEM or Security Incident and Event Management solution. These umbrella solutions, although sometimes costly and time-consuming to fully implement, provide a complete real-time monitoring system that then cross-checks the myriad signals with threat information from a large database. SIEMs can also record and analyze any potential threats in the meantime and identify potentially dangerous situations before they happen. Finally, a SIEM will alert the personnel of its findings.

The effectiveness of each of these solutions highly depends on whether they are configured properly, and whether they are suited for the organization and tasks at hand. Without the right expertise (knowledgeable personnel) working for the organization and with these tools, they are not of much use. Today’s cybersecurity environment is extremely complex, dynamic, and rapidly changing. Cybersecurity solutions like malicious activity monitoring systems have to sift through enormous amounts of information (for example in multi-cloud environments) which means there is always the potential for errors and false positives.

There are several international frameworks in place that have been instituted by, for example, the UK and the U.S. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Assessment Framework is one of them, while the U.S. has initiated several infrastructure assessments and resiliency programs to fight malicious activity. According to the U.S. CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency), it is important to understand cyber-hygiene. CISA’s take on cyber-hygiene is the following (and this applies to malicious activity on a global scale);

All of the above are recommended directions that organizations should follow, or rather implement, to make it difficult for cybercriminals to conduct malicious activity on an organization’s network. With more focus on global cybersecurity like this, as well as the utilization of emerging technologies and new techniques, a well-secured organization will throw a cog in the wheel of cybercrime.