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AI Case Study

Bypassing Cylance's AI Malware Detection - AI Case Study

Researchers at Skylight were able to create a universal bypass string that evades detection by Cylance's AI Malware detector when appended to a malicious file.

ExerciseCylancePROTECT, Cylance Smart AntivirusSkylight CyberReconnaissanceAI Model AccessDiscovery

Overview

Case steps6Steps described in the case record.
Techniques6Attack methods mentioned in the case steps.
Linked CVEs0Known vulnerabilities mentioned in the record.

Risk patterns

Patterns found in the case record and its linked vulnerabilities.

  • 1Dominant ATLAS tactic. Reconnaissance appears in 1 case steps.
  • 2Multiple attack methods. The case connects to 6 unique AI attack methods.

Procedure timeline

Search the case steps or filter them by attacker goal.

Reconnaissance1AI Model Access1Discovery1Resource Development1AI Attack Staging1Defense Evasion1
  1. Reconnaissance

    The researchers read publicly available information about Cylance's AI Malware detector. They gathered this information from various sources such as public talks as well as patent submissions by Cylance.

  2. Discovery

    The researchers enabled verbose logging, which exposes the inner workings of the ML model, specifically around reputation scoring and model ensembling.

  3. Resource Development

    The researchers used the reputation scoring information to reverse engineer which attributes provided what level of positive or negative reputation. Along the way, they discovered a secondary model which was an override for the first model. Positive assessments from the second model overrode the decision of the core ML model.

  4. Defense Evasion

    Due to the secondary model overriding the primary, the researchers were effectively able to bypass the ML model.

Mitigations

Defenses connected to the attack methods in this case.

Sources

Original public records and references for this case.

Original source

Original source links

Open the MITRE ATLAS data and public references used for this case study.