Over the last years, threat intelligence sharing has steadily grown, leading cybersecurity professionals to access increasingly larger amounts of heterogeneous data. Among those, cyber attacks' Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) have proven to be particularly valuable to characterize threat actors' behaviors and, thus, improve defensive countermeasures. Unfortunately, this information is often hidden within human-readable textual reports and must be extracted manually. In this paper, we evaluate several classification approaches to automatically retrieve TTPs from unstructured text. To implement these approaches, we take advantage of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, an open knowledge base of adversarial tactics and techniques, to train classifiers and label results. Finally, we present rcATT, a tool built on top of our findings and freely distributed to the security community to support cyber threat report automated analysis.
Many public sources of cyber threat and vulnerability information exist to help defend cyber systems. This paper links MITRE's ATT&CK MATRIX of Tactics and Techniques, NIST's Common Weakness Enumerations (CWE), Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), and Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification list (CAPEC), to gain further insight from alerts, threats and vulnerabilities. We preserve all entries and relations of the sources, while enabling bi-directional, relational path tracing within an aggregate data graph called BRON. In one example, we use BRON to enhance the information …
This paper explores deploying a cyber honeypot system to learn how cyber defenders can use a honeypot system as a deception mechanism to gather intelligence. Defenders can gather intelligence about an attacker such as the autonomous system that the IP of the attacker is allocated from, the way the attacker is trying to penetrate the system, what different types of attacks are being used, the commands the attacker is running once they are inside the honeypot, and what malware the attacker is downloading to the deployed system. We demonstrate an experiment to implement a honeypot system that can…
AnnoCTR: A Dataset for Detecting and Linking Entities, Tactics, and Techniques in Cyber Threat Reports
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Hochschule der Medien（斯图加特传媒大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Universität Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）
Learning to Communicate in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Cyber Defence
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Royal Military College of Canada（加拿大皇家军事学院电子与计算机工程系）；Defence Research and Development Canada（加拿大国防研究发展署）
本文提出在Cyber Operations Research Gym中利用可微分智能体间学习算法训练防御智能体，使其在部分可观测网络环境中学习低成本通信与防御战术策略，从而提升自主网络防御的协同决策能力。
Identification of cyber threats is one of the essential tasks for security teams. Currently, cyber threats can be identified using knowledge organized into various formats, enumerations, and knowledge bases. This paper studies the current challenges of identifying vulnerabilities and threats in cyberspace using enumerations and data about assets. Although enumerations are used in practice, we point out several issues that still decrease the quality of vulnerability and threat identification. Since vulnerability identification methods are based on network monitoring and agents, the issues are r…
Due to the ever-increasing threat of cyber-attacks to critical cyber infrastructure, organizations are focusing on building their cybersecurity knowledge base. A salient list of cybersecurity knowledge is the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list, which details vulnerabilities found in a wide range of software and hardware. However, these vulnerabilities often do not have a mitigation strategy to prevent an attacker from exploiting them. A well-known cybersecurity risk management framework, MITRE ATT&CK, offers mitigation techniques for many malicious tactics. Despite the tremendous …
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Scaling the cyber hunt problem poses several key technical challenges. Detecting and characterizing cyber threats at scale in large enterprise networks is hard because of the vast quantity and complexity of the data that must be analyzed as adversaries deploy varied and evolving tactics to accomplish their goals. There is a great need to automate all aspects, and, indeed, the workflow of cyber hunting. AI offers many ways to support this. We have developed the WILEE system that automates cyber threat hunting by translating high-level threat descriptions into many possible concrete implementati…
The cyberthreat landscape is continuously evolving. Hence, continuous monitoring and sharing of threat intelligence have become a priority for organizations. Threat reports, published by cybersecurity vendors, contain detailed descriptions of attack Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) written in an unstructured text format. Extracting TTP from these reports aids cybersecurity practitioners and researchers learn and adapt to evolving attacks and in planning threat mitigation. Researchers have proposed TTP extraction methods in the literature, however, not all of these proposed methods are…
Cyberattacks use adversarial techniques to bypass system defenses, persist, and eventually breach systems. The MITRE ATT\&CK framework catalogs a set of adversarial techniques and maps between adversaries and their used techniques and tactics. Understanding how adversaries deploy techniques in conjunction is pivotal for learning adversary behavior, hunting potential threats, and formulating a proactive defense. The goal of this research is to aid cybersecurity practitioners and researchers in choosing detection and mitigation strategies through co-occurrence analysis of adversarial techniques …
The increasingly sophisticated and growing number of threat actors along with the sheer speed at which cyber attacks unfold, make timely identification of attacks imperative to an organisations' security. Consequently, persons responsible for security employ a large variety of information sources concerning emerging attacks, attackers' course of actions or indicators of compromise. However, a vast amount of the needed security information is available in unstructured textual form, which complicates the automated and timely extraction of attackers' Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs). In …
Content generation that is both relevant and up to date with the current threats of the target audience is a critical element in the success of any Cyber Security Exercise (CSE). Through this work, we explore the results of applying machine learning techniques to unstructured information sources to generate structured CSE content. The corpus of our work is a large dataset of publicly available cyber security articles that have been used to predict future threats and to form the skeleton for new exercise scenarios. Machine learning techniques, like named entity recognition (NER) and topic extra…
The Cyber world is plagued with ever-evolving malware that readily infiltrates all defense mechanisms, operates viciously unbeknownst to the user and surreptitiously exfiltrate sensitive data. Understanding the inner workings of such malware provides a leverage to effectively combat them. This understanding, is pursued through dynamic analysis which is conducted manually or automatically. Malware authors accordingly, have devised and advanced evasion techniques to thwart or evade these analyses. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on malware dynamic analysis evasion techniques. In…
Adversaries are often able to penetrate networks and compromise systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in people and systems. The key to the success of these attacks is information that adversaries collect throughout the phases of the cyber kill chain. We summarize and analyze the methods, tactics, and tools that adversaries use to conduct reconnaissance activities throughout the attack process. First, we discuss what types of information adversaries seek, and how and when they can obtain this information. Then, we provide a taxonomy and detailed overview of adversarial reconnaissance technique…
The CTI (Cyber Threat Intelligence) sharing and exchange is an effective method to improve the responsiveness of the protection party. Blockchain technology enables sharing collaboration consortium to conduct a trusted CTI sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. However, the distributed connectivity of the blockchain-based CTI sharing model proposed before exposes the systems into byzantine attacks, the compromised members of partner organizations will further decrease the accuracy and trust level of CTI by generating false reporting. To address the unbalance issues of …
From Retrieval to Reasoning: A Framework for Cyber Threat Intelligence NER with Explicit and Adaptive Instructions
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, Ministry of Education, China（教育部下一代智能搜索与推荐工程研究中心）
ISADM: An Integrated STRIDE, ATT&CK, and D3FEND Model for Threat Modeling Against Real-world Adversaries
University of New South Wales (UNSW)（新南威尔士大学）；Bangladesh University of Business and Technology (BUBT)（孟加拉商业与技术大学）；Anchoram’s Cyber Security Practice（Anchoram网络安全实践）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
This report summarizes the discussions and findings of the Workshop on Intelligent Autonomous Agents for Cyber Defence and Resilience organized by the NATO research group IST-152-RTG. The workshop was held in Prague, Czech Republic, on 18-20 October 2017. There is a growing recognition that future cyber defense should involve extensive use of partially autonomous agents that actively patrol the friendly network, and detect and react to hostile activities rapidly (far faster than human reaction time), before the hostile malware is able to inflict major damage, evade friendly agents, or destroy …
Engineering more secure software has become a critical challenge in the cyber world. It is very important to develop methodologies, techniques, and tools for developing secure software. To develop secure software, software developers need to think like an attacker through mining software repositories. These aim to analyze and understand the data repositories related to software development. The main goal is to use these software repositories to support the decision-making process of software development. There are different vulnerability databases like Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Common…
The sophistication and complexity of cyber attacks and the variety of targeted platforms have been growing in recent years. Various adversaries are abusing an increasing range of platforms, e.g., enterprise platforms, mobile phones, PCs, transportation systems, and industrial control systems. In recent years, we have witnessed various cyber attacks on transportation systems, including attacks on ports, airports, and trains. It is only a matter of time before transportation systems become a more common target of cyber attackers. Due to the enormous potential damage inherent in attacking vehicle…
Threat actors can be persistent, motivated and agile, and leverage a diversified and extensive set of tactics and techniques to attain their goals. In response to that, defenders establish threat intelligence programs to stay threat-informed and lower risk. Actionable threat intelligence is integrated into security information and event management systems (SIEM) or is accessed via more dedicated tools like threat intelligence platforms. A threat intelligence platform gives access to contextual threat information by aggregating, processing, correlating, and analyzing real-time data and informat…
As Critical National Infrastructures are becoming more vulnerable to cyber attacks, their protection becomes a significant issue for any organization as well as a nation. Moreover, the ability to attribute is a vital element of avoiding impunity in cyberspace. In this article, we present main threats to critical infrastructures along with protective measures that one nation can take, and which are classified according to legal, technical, organizational, capacity building, and cooperation aspects. Finally we provide an overview of current methods and practices regarding cyber attribution and c…
