Mining Temporal Attack Patterns from Cyberthreat Intelligence Reports

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Rahman, Md Rayhanur, Wroblewski, Brandon, Matthews, Quinn, Morgan, Brantley, Menzies, Tim, Williams, Laurie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Rahman, Md Rayhanur
Wroblewski, Brandon
Matthews, Quinn
Morgan, Brantley
Menzies, Tim
Williams, Laurie
author_facet Rahman, Md Rayhanur
Wroblewski, Brandon
Matthews, Quinn
Morgan, Brantley
Menzies, Tim
Williams, Laurie
contents Defending from cyberattacks requires practitioners to operate on high-level adversary behavior. Cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) reports on past cyberattack incidents describe the chain of malicious actions with respect to time. To avoid repeating cyberattack incidents, practitioners must proactively identify and defend against recurring chain of actions - which we refer to as temporal attack patterns. Automatically mining the patterns among actions provides structured and actionable information on the adversary behavior of past cyberattacks. The goal of this paper is to aid security practitioners in prioritizing and proactive defense against cyberattacks by mining temporal attack patterns from cyberthreat intelligence reports. To this end, we propose ChronoCTI, an automated pipeline for mining temporal attack patterns from cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) reports of past cyberattacks. To construct ChronoCTI, we build the ground truth dataset of temporal attack patterns and apply state-of-the-art large language models, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques. We apply ChronoCTI on a set of 713 CTI reports, where we identify 124 temporal attack patterns - which we categorize into nine pattern categories. We identify that the most prevalent pattern category is to trick victim users into executing malicious code to initiate the attack, followed by bypassing the anti-malware system in the victim network. Based on the observed patterns, we advocate organizations to train users about cybersecurity best practices, introduce immutable operating systems with limited functionalities, and enforce multi-user authentications. Moreover, we advocate practitioners to leverage the automated mining capability of ChronoCTI and design countermeasures against the recurring attack patterns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_01883
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mining Temporal Attack Patterns from Cyberthreat Intelligence Reports
Rahman, Md Rayhanur
Wroblewski, Brandon
Matthews, Quinn
Morgan, Brantley
Menzies, Tim
Williams, Laurie
Cryptography and Security
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
Defending from cyberattacks requires practitioners to operate on high-level adversary behavior. Cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) reports on past cyberattack incidents describe the chain of malicious actions with respect to time. To avoid repeating cyberattack incidents, practitioners must proactively identify and defend against recurring chain of actions - which we refer to as temporal attack patterns. Automatically mining the patterns among actions provides structured and actionable information on the adversary behavior of past cyberattacks. The goal of this paper is to aid security practitioners in prioritizing and proactive defense against cyberattacks by mining temporal attack patterns from cyberthreat intelligence reports. To this end, we propose ChronoCTI, an automated pipeline for mining temporal attack patterns from cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) reports of past cyberattacks. To construct ChronoCTI, we build the ground truth dataset of temporal attack patterns and apply state-of-the-art large language models, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques. We apply ChronoCTI on a set of 713 CTI reports, where we identify 124 temporal attack patterns - which we categorize into nine pattern categories. We identify that the most prevalent pattern category is to trick victim users into executing malicious code to initiate the attack, followed by bypassing the anti-malware system in the victim network. Based on the observed patterns, we advocate organizations to train users about cybersecurity best practices, introduce immutable operating systems with limited functionalities, and enforce multi-user authentications. Moreover, we advocate practitioners to leverage the automated mining capability of ChronoCTI and design countermeasures against the recurring attack patterns.
title Mining Temporal Attack Patterns from Cyberthreat Intelligence Reports
topic Cryptography and Security
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01883