Buzzwords are the bane of the infosec community. Whether it’s “cyber” or “APT”, these terms are often used as nothing more than a way to generate clicks or by marketing teams to push more blinky lights to customers. “Fileless malware” is the latest example of this. Attacks leveraging malware that have been dubbed “fileless malware attacks” have been generating significant media coverage recently leading many to wonder what impact these attacks may have on their organizations or whether they are adequately protected against them. In many cases these attacks are not truly fileless and result in various artifacts being written to targeted systems. In this presentation we will provide a brief history of fileless malware as well as walk through some specific examples of malware that makes use of this approach to infecting systems. We will also cover why most malware is not actually “fileless”, along with specific examples of threats that make use of interesting persistence mechanisms that do not resemble what many have grown accustomed to seeing from malware.