The cloud model allows many enterprises able to outsource computing resources at an affordable price without having to commit the expense upfront. Although the cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, there are still many security concerns due to inherently complex model the cloud providers operate on (e.g.,multi-tenancy). In addition, the enterprises whose services have migrated into the cloud have a preference for their own cybersecurity situation awareness capability on top of the security mechanisms provided by the cloud providers. In this way, the enterprises can monitor the performance of the security offerings of the cloud and have a choice to decide and select potential response strategies more appropriate to the enterprise in the presence of the attack where the defense provided by the cloud doesn't work for them. However, some response strategies, such as Moving Target Defense (MTD) techniques shown to be effective to secure cloud, cannot be deployed by the enterprise themselves. In this paper, we propose a framework that enables better collaboration between enterprises and cloud providers. Our proposed framework, which offers more in-depth security analysis based on the set of most advanced security metrics, allows the security experts of the enterprise to obtain better situational awareness in the cloud. With better and more effective situation awareness of cloud security, our framework can support better decision making and further allows to deploy more appropriate threat responses to protect the outsourced resources. We also propose a secure protocol which can facilitate more secure communication between the enterprises and cloud provider. Using our proposed secure protocol, which is based on authentication and key exchange mechanism, the enterprises can send a secure request to the cloud provider to perform a selected defensive strategy.
The advancement and the proliferation of information systems among enterprises have given rise to understanding cybersecurity. Cybersecurity practices provide a set of techniques and procedures to protect the systems, networks, programs and data from attack, damage, or unauthorised access. Such cybersecurity practices vary and are applied differently to different types of enterprises. The purpose of this research is to compare the critical cybersecurity threats and practices in the cloud context among micro, small, and medium enterprises. By conducting a survey among 289 micro, small and mediu…
While the Internet of things (IoT) promises to improve areas such as energy efficiency, health care, and transportation, it is highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. In particular, DDoS attacks work by overflowing the bandwidth of a server. But many IoT devices form part of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Therefore, they can be used to launch a "physical" denial-of-service attack (PDoS) in which IoT devices overflow the "physical bandwidth" of a CPS. In this paper, we quantify the population-based risk to a group of IoT devices targeted by malware for a PDoS attack. To model the recruitment of bots,…
Lateral movement attacks are a serious threat to enterprise security. In these attacks, an attacker compromises a trusted user account to get a foothold into the enterprise network and uses it to attack other trusted users, increasingly gaining higher and higher privileges. Such lateral attacks are very hard to model because of the unwitting role that users play in the attack and even harder to detect and prevent because of their low and slow nature. In this paper, a theoretical framework is presented for modeling lateral movement attacks and for proposing a methodology for designing resilient…
The topic will focus on the U.S. Department of Defense strategy towards improving their network security defenses for the department and the steps they have taken at the agency level where components under DOD such as The Defense Information Systems Agency are working towards adding tools that provides additional capabilities in the cyber space. This approach will be analyzed to determine if DOD goals address any of their vulnerabilities towards protecting their networks. One of the agencies under the DOD umbrella called The Defense Information Systems Agency provides DOD a template on how to …
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Cyber Reconnaissance, Inc.（网络侦察公司）；Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS)（南方国立大学（UNS））；Institute for C.S. and Eng. (CONICET–UNS)（计算机科学与工程研究所（CONICET–UNS））；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories（洛克希德·马丁先进技术实验室）
Recent incidents of data breaches call for organizations to proactively identify cyber attacks on their systems. Darkweb/Deepweb (D2web) forums and marketplaces provide environments where hackers anonymously discuss existing vulnerabilities and commercialize malicious software to exploit those vulnerabilities. These platforms offer security practitioners a threat intelligence environment that allows to mine for patterns related to organization-targeted cyber attacks. In this paper, we describe a system (called DARKMENTION) that learns association rules correlating indicators of attacks from D2…
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) have recently emerged as a significant security challenge for a cyber-physical system due to their stealthy, dynamic and adaptive nature. Proactive dynamic defenses provide a strategic and holistic security mechanism to increase the costs of attacks and mitigate the risks. This work proposes a dynamic game framework to model a long-term interaction between a stealthy attacker and a proactive defender. The stealthy and deceptive behaviors are captured by the multi-stage game of incomplete information, where each player has his own private information unknown t…
With rise in security breaches over the past few years, there has been an increasing need to mine insights from social media platforms to raise alerts of possible attacks in an attempt to defend conflict during competition. In this study, we attempt to build a framework that utilizes unconventional signals from the darkweb forums by leveraging the reply network structure of user interactions with the goal of predicting enterprise related external cyber attacks. We use both unsupervised and supervised learning models that address the challenges that come with the lack of enterprise attack metad…
Since the term "Cyber threat hunting" was introduced in 2016, there have been a rising trend of proactive defensive measure to create more cyber security. This research will look into peer reviewed literature on the subject of cyber threat hunting. Our study shows an increase in the field with methods of machine learning.\\ Keywords: Cyber threat, Cyber security, threat hunting , security system, data driven, Intel, analytic driven, TTPs
Maintaining security and privacy in real-world enterprise networks is becoming more and more challenging. Cyber actors are increasingly employing previously unreported and state-of-the-art techniques to break into corporate networks. To develop novel and effective methods to thwart these sophisticated cyberattacks, we need datasets that reflect real-world enterprise scenarios to a high degree of accuracy. However, precious few such datasets are publicly available. Researchers still predominantly use the decade-old KDD datasets, however, studies showed that these datasets do not adequately refl…
A design framework recently has been developed to stabilize interconnected multiagent systems in a distributed manner, and systematically capture the architectural aspect of cyber-physical systems. Such a control theoretic framework, however, results in a stabilization protocol which is passive with respect to the cyber attacks and conservative regarding the guaranteed level of resiliency. We treat the control layer topology and stabilization gains as the degrees of freedom, and develop a mixed control and cybersecurity design framework to address the above concerns. From a control perspective…
Purpose: An essential component of an organisation's cybersecurity strategy is building awareness and education of online threats, and how to protect corporate data and services. This research article focuses on this topic and proposes a high-level programme for cybersecurity education and awareness to be used when targeting Small-to-Medium-sized Enterprises/Businesses (SMEs/SMBs) at a city-level. We ground this programme in existing research as well as unique insight into an ongoing city-based project with similar aims. Findings: We find that whilst literature can be informative at guiding ed…
In this paper, we present an operational system for cyber threat intelligence gathering from various social platforms on the Internet particularly sites on the darknet and deepnet. We focus our attention to collecting information from hacker forum discussions and marketplaces offering products and services focusing on malicious hacking. We have developed an operational system for obtaining information from these sites for the purposes of identifying emerging cyber threats. Currently, this system collects on average 305 high-quality cyber threat warnings each week. These threat warnings include…
Cybersecurity tools are increasingly automated with artificial intelligent (AI) capabilities to match the exponential scale of attacks, compensate for the relatively slower rate of training new cybersecurity talents, and improve of the accuracy and performance of both tools and users. However, the safe and appropriate usage of autonomous cyber attack tools - especially at the development stages for these tools - is still largely an unaddressed gap. Our survey of current literature and tools showed that most of the existing cyber range designs are mostly using manual tools and have not consider…
Cyber deception has recently received increasing attentions as a promising mechanism for proactive cyber defense. Cyber deception strategies aim at injecting intentionally falsified information to sabotage the early stage of attack reconnaissance and planning in order to render the final attack action harmless or ineffective. Motivated by recent advances in cyber deception research, we in this paper provide a formal view of cyber deception, and review high-level deception schemes and actions. We also summarize and classify recent research results of cyber defense techniques built upon the conc…
An Adversarial Robustness Benchmark for Enterprise Network Intrusion Detection
Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development (GECAD), School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP)（高级创新与发展智能工程与计算研究组（GECAD），波尔图理工学院工程学院（ISEP/IPP））
There have been numerous works on network intrusion detection and prevention systems, but work on application layer intrusion detection and prevention is rare and not very mature. Intrusion detection and prevention at both network and application layers are important for cyber-security and enterprise system security. Since application layer intrusion is increasing day by day, it is imperative to give adequate attention to it and use state-of-the-art algorithms for effective detection and prevention. This paper talks about current state of application layer intrusion detection and prevention ca…
Securing enterprise networks presents challenges in terms of both their size and distributed structure. Data required to detect and characterize malicious activities may be diffused and may be located across network and endpoint devices. Further, cyber-relevant data routinely exceeds total available storage, bandwidth, and analysis capability, often by several orders of magnitude. Real-time detection of threats within or across very large enterprise networks is not simply an issue of scale, but also a challenge due to the variable nature of malicious activities and their presentations. The sys…
Cybersecurity training should be adaptable to evolving the cyber threat landscape, cost effective and integrated well with other enterprise management components. Unfortunately, very few cybersecurity training platforms can satisfy such requirements. This paper proposes a new and novel model for conducting cybersecurity training with three main objectives: (i) training should be initiated by emerging relevant threats and delivered first to the most vulnerable members (ii) the process has to be agile (iii) training results must be able to provide actionable intelligence. For the first time, thi…
Threats targeting cyberspace are becoming more prominent and intelligent day by day. This inherently leads to a dire demand for continuous security validation and testing. Using this paper, we aim to provide a holistic and precise security analysis rating framework for organizations that increases the overall coherency of the outcomes of such testing. This scorecard is based on the security assessment performed following the globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques called the MITRE ATTACK matrix. The scorecard for an evaluation is generated by ingesting the securi…
Synthetic APTs: the Collapse of TTP-Based Attribution
Alias Robotics（Alias机器人公司）；University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯斐迪南二世大学）；Johannes Kepler University Linz（林茨约翰内斯·开普勒大学）；CYBER RANGES（网络靶场）；PurpleAILAB（PurpleAI实验室）
Maintenance staff of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is generally not aware about information technologies, and even less about cyber security problems. The scary impact of cyber attacks in the industrial world calls for tools to train defensive skills and test effective security measures. Cyber range offers this opportunity, but current research is lacking cost-effective solutions verticalized for the industrial domain. This work proposes ICSrange, a simulation-based cyber range platform for Industrial Control Systems. ICSrange adopts Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technologies to virtualiz…
Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）
Proactive approaches to security, such as adversary emulation, leverage information about threat actors and their techniques (Cyber Threat Intelligence, CTI). However, most CTI still comes in unstructured forms (i.e., natural language), such as incident reports and leaked documents. To support proactive security efforts, we present an experimental study on the automatic classification of unstructured CTI into attack techniques using machine learning (ML). We contribute with two new datasets for CTI analysis, and we evaluate several ML models, including both traditional and deep learning-based …
Cybersecurity is increasingly a concern for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and there exist many awareness training programs and tools for them. The literature mainly studies SMEs as a unitary type of company and provides one-size-fits-all recommendations and solutions. However, SMEs are not homogeneous. They are diverse with different vulnerabilities, cybersecurity needs, and competencies. Few studies considered such differences in standards and certificates for security tools adoption and cybersecurity tailoring for these SMEs. This study proposes a classification framework with a…
Recent trends in targeted cyber-attacks has increased the interest of research in the field of cyber security. Such attacks have massive disruptive effects on rganizations, enterprises and governments. Cyber kill chain is a model to describe cyber-attacks so as to develop incident response and analysis capabilities. Cyber kill chain in simple terms is an attack chain, the path that an intruder takes to penetrate information systems over time to execute an attack on the target. This paper broadly categories the methodologies, techniques and tools involved in cyber-attacks. This paper intends to…
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are serious cyber attacks and mitigating DDoS attacks in cloud is a topic of ongoing research interest which remains a major security challenge. Fog computing is an extension of cloud computing which has been used to secure cloud. Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a newly recognized, proactive security defense that can be used to mitigate DDoS attacks on cloud. MTD intends to make a system dynamic in nature and uncertain by changing attack surface continuously to confuse attackers. In this paper, a novel DDoS mitigation framework is presented to suppor…
The lack of data sets derived from operational enterprise networks continues to be a critical deficiency in the cyber security research community. Unfortunately, releasing viable data sets to the larger com- munity is challenging for a number of reasons, primarily the difficulty of balancing security and privacy concerns against the fidelity and utility of the data. This chapter discusses the importance of cyber secu- rity research data sets and introduces a large data set derived from the operational network environment at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The hope is that this data set and ass…
