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Intelligence, Hunting and modelling Via an ATT&CKers Lens

Unless you’ve been asleep recently, you’ll oftimes be alert to MITRE’s ATT&CK framework. It is a online game changer for defenders since it maps out the normal threats an enterprise will encounter. ATT&CK aligns this to protective and detective settings and allows everyone within the business to speak a standard language on what attackers might undertake an infrastructure. As Cisco’s IR and SOC teams will let you know, ATT&CK is effective make it possible for both blue and reddish teams to co-exist and function effectively as well as common targets and KPIs to calculate your enterprise architecture. Nevertheless, what goes on when it falls brief and the threat cleverness and hypotheses don’t can be found?

Intelligence analysts will most likely tell you: Knowing the threats you might come in to get hold of with boils down to harnessing the gemstone model absolutely help understand 4 areas of risk – adversaries, infrastructure, victims and capability. However, the truth is, this intelligence is frequently weighted towards the initial three and that publicly accessible TI just tells an organisation area of the story. Don’t rely a lot on DNS telemetry and document hashes too, as you’re not obtaining the full picture probably. The big blind place is usually that ATT&CK doesn’t necessarily let you know what’s coming next once usage of the enterprise, by a good attacker, is secured. Specifically, using ATT&amp even;CK in a far more holistic sense with an increase of sophisticated enterprise supervising, you might not have sufficient details for the security teams to comprehend the business enterprise systems where a lot of the worthiness of an organisation might reside.

Putting all this together, during the last 12 a few months roughly, I’ve as a down-time project already been reviewing the anonymised information that we collect within CX’s assessment engagements. Desire to was to observe how and where Cisco could find out classes and whether my group could use that information to form Cisco’s understanding. Within Cisco’s CX team, I’ve usage of some pretty advanced tooling for reporting. We ingest various lessons of test information routinely, normalise it, and utilize it to create reproducible reports. It currently has the capacity to aid in real cause analysis and description of get well programs but I thought we’re able to do a lot more with it. Within Def Con 28 Secure Setting, I delivered a program on day 2 of the Red Team village to talk about our progress.

Specifically, in the session, I discussed our research on:

  • Analysing each one of the MITRE ATT&CK matrices
  • Leveraging metrics such as for example CVSS, CWE, etc
  • Applying STIX to encode existing information
  • Applying new labels to assist in threat modelling
  • How Cisco are usually leveraging this evaluation on real life scenarios for the customers to help reduce the chances of the threat groupings they face
  • Aligning threat versions to the business enterprise with FAIR for qualitative danger
  • Establishing telemetry and constructing SOC and IR playbooks to handle obscure platforms
  • Identifying tooling gaps where it’s much less simple as yet another firewall, IDS or even AV product but in which a real understanding associated with the business enterprise is necessary
  • Some of the problems we’ve hit and probable solutions

To aid to make this true point, The aforementioned was visited by me topics considering how they might connect with the main topics mid-tier server security. This is a location that’s dear to my center (not may Cisco people have an IBM AIX and AS/400 server beneath the table) and one that lots of organisations struggle with.

Whilst sharing my complete set of conclusions is really a little bit beyond the scope of the post, several samples to whet the urge for food:

    • Automated extraction of hypotheses feasible

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  • Vulnerability findings could be labelled with meta-data making use of standardised dictionaries
  • Visible representation of real threat versions and kill chains from penetration tests helps give situation awareness
  • Better analysis and conversation of threats with this peers through richer swap of meta-data will enhance the situation further

The slides for the session (All the threats – Intelligence, modelling, simulation and hunting via an ATT&CKers lens), are available in the Cisco CX Security Labs on GitHub.

Hopefully, my concepts will provide you with some food for believed on how best to approach and gauge the security of one’s organisation. It is possible to read a lot more about Cisco Security options and our assistance for MITRE ATT&CK, visit our Cybersecurity Framework Guidance.