Despite continued advancements in endpoint security, from Next-Gen Antivirus (NGAV) to modern EDR and SIEM platforms, many organisations operate under an illusion of protection. In reality, threat actors are in novating faster than defenders can adapt. The emergence of offensive tools like the newly released Zig Strike toolkit reveals just how easily even advanced, policy-compliant security stacks can be bypassed. Zig Strike represents a new generation of open-source red teaming frameworks that are designed not merely to test detection, but to exploit the architectural blind spots of endpoint protection platforms, in cluding Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Written in the memory-safe, high-performance Zig programming language, the toolkit provides attackers with a web interface for crafting highly evasive payloads that by pass modern AV, NGAV, and EDR solutions through a blend of stealthy injection techniques, compile-time obfuscation, anti-sandbox mechanisms, and entropy reduction.

More than a red team utility, Zig Strike is a proof point: even the most hardened environments are susceptible to techniques that operate below the radar of behavioural analytics and machine learning-based detection engines. By leveraging trusted interfaces (e.g. Excel Add-ins), hijacking process threads, fragmenting
shellcode across memory, and exploiting legitimate APIs, the toolkit underscores a troubling reality: the modern attacker doesn’t need to break in—they can walk in undetected. 

This report uses Zig Strike as a lens to examine the broader industry-wide challenge of endpoint evasion, referencing recent CVEs and bypass techniques that illustrate the systemic weaknesses in Defender and EDR architectures. We explore: 

 • How offensive toolkits are evolving to bypass enterprise-grade security. 

 • The injection and obfuscation techniques used to evade detection at runtime and at rest.

 • Real-world vulnerabilities and architectural design flaws that make these bypasses possible.

 • Strategic recommendations for mitigating exposure and strengthening endpoint resilience. 

Why This Matters:
In an era where nation-state-level tools are open-sourced and operationalised by commodity threat actors, enterprises can no longer rely solely on vendor-issued
controls or default configurations. Understanding the mechanics of evasion is essential to building effective countermeasures, not just detecting known threats,
but anticipating unknown techniques. 

This is not just about tool evasion. It is about trust in our defensive architecture, and the imperative to reassess that trust with urgency.

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