How attackers exploit malicious, vulnerable software libraries to launch stealth attacks

Andrzej Jarmolowicz, Operations Director at Cybershure.

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Modern cyber attacks seldom begin with loud, disruptive breaches. Instead, attackers increasingly rely on malicious or vulnerable software libraries and third-party components embedded deep within applications and systems to create covert entry points. These components operate with trusted privileges, function silently and often go unnoticed by security teams, making them ideal tools for attackers aiming to maintain persistence undetected.

The cyber security industry faces a well-documented visibility gap: 73% of all security incidents originate from unmanaged or unknown assets, a category that includes hidden software components, DLLs, packages and outdated libraries. These blind spots enable attackers to bypass traditional defence layers and infiltrate environments well before alerts are triggered.

Today’s applications rely on thousands of open source libraries and vendor-supplied components. While this accelerates development, it also enlarges the attack surface. Vulnerabilities within libraries, malicious packages inserted by attackers or misconfigured dependencies act as entry points for compromise.

CyberCyte emphasises the importance of gaining visibility into such artefacts, highlighting that organisations must be capable of detecting malicious DLLs and vulnerabilities in software libraries to prevent early-stage compromise.

Attackers exploit library weaknesses to:

• Hide malicious routines inside legitimate processes.
• Execute payloads silently via DLL injection or tampered packages.
• Establish persistence through configuration drift.
• Expand laterally using the application’s inherited privileges.
• Collect sensitive data without triggering endpoint detection tools.

1. Initial compromise through a vulnerable library

Attackers exploit outdated or unmonitored components within endpoints or servers. Since most security tools focus on known, managed assets, these vulnerabilities often stay hidden.

2. Silent execution inside trusted processes

Once loaded by the application, the malicious library runs under trusted process names. Without artefact-level analysis, the behaviour merges with normal system activity.

3. Configuration manipulation for persistence

Compromised libraries can subtly modify system or application settings. Without ongoing configuration review, such changes often go unnoticed, allowing prolonged access. CyberCyte highlights this as a major weakness that attackers take advantage of.

4. Lateral movement and data exfiltration

By the time attackers exfiltrate data or detonate ransomware, they have often remained undetected for weeks or months.

Library-based attacks succeed because most organisations lack comprehensive visibility across threats, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and internal artefacts. Traditional SIEMs, EDRs and scanners focus narrowly on logs or known endpoints.

CyberCyte addresses this challenge by:

• Consolidating threats, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations into one exposure view.
• Analysing forensic artefacts, DLLs, scripts, packages and system histories to uncover unknown risks.
• Using AI to remove false positives and identify anomalous behaviour.
• Executing complete remediation and response actions to eliminate vulnerabilities, not just detect them.

The solution is adopting a continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) strategy. Organisations that implement CTEM reduce breach risk by threefold, according to the referenced industry guidance in CyberCyte's documentation. 

Effective CTEM requires:

• Full visibility of all software components, including shadow-IT and unmanaged libraries.
• Continuous vulnerability and configuration assessment.
• Automated remediation and response.
• Integration of threat exposure with GRC requirements and business context.

CyberCyte X-CTEM enables precisely this – unifying exposure, governance and remediation into a single platform so organisations can detect and neutralise library-based threats before attackers exploit them.

Andrzej Jarmolowicz is co-founder and Operations Director at Cybershure. The company is a distributor of bespoke IT solutions, with offices in London and South Africa, and is the sole distributor of CyberCyte in Africa.