OPSWAT’s 2025 Threat Landscape Report, based on over 890,000 sandbox scans, reveals a 127% increase in malware complexity in just six months. Attackers are increasingly using multi-stage, heavily obfuscated payloads—such as NetReactor loaders—that evade traditional signature- and reputation-based detection. As a result, outdated defenses incorrectly classified roughly one in every fourteen malicious files as safe, highlighting a growing gap between modern attack techniques and legacy security tools.

The report emphasizes that behavior-based, emulation-driven detection pipelines provide a significant advantage. OPSWAT’s system was able to reclassify 7.3% of malicious files faster than public threat intelligence sources, often a full day earlier, achieving a 99.97% detection rate. Stealth techniques are also becoming more sophisticated, including clipboard hijacking, steganographic loaders, Google-embedded command-and-control channels, and .NET Bitmap malware delivering Snake Keylogger payloads. These trends underscore the need for adaptive, multilayered, and context-aware cybersecurity strategies to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.

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Source: https://industrialcyber.co/reports/opswat-threat-report-finds-127-spike-in-malware-complexity-warns-of-failing-legacy-defenses/