Threat intelligence and forensics

Cyber kill chain

• Framework for identification and prevention of cyber intrusions activity.
• Developed by Lockheed Martin
• Identifies what the adversaries must complete in order to achieve their objective.
• 🤗 Based on military kill chains, a concept consisting of • target identification • force dispatch to target decision • order to attack the target • the destruction of the target
• 🤗 Critiques states it only defends "perimeter" and isn't suitable model to insider threats.
• E.g. A "Kill Chain" Analysis of the 2013 Target Data Breach

Cyber kill chain steps

• ❗ Not same in every organization as different organizations have constructed their own kill chains to try to model different threats

1. Reconnaissance
   • Collecting as much as information about the target.
   • E.g. harvesting email addresses, conferece information etc.
   • See also footprinting
2. Weaponization
   • Analyzing collected data to identify and vulnerabilities to exploit to gain access
   • E.g. creating a phishing campaign based on collected data
3. Delivery
   • Weaponized bundle to the victim via email, web, USB, etc.
   • Key to measure the effectiveness of the defense strategies implemented by the target.
   • E.g. sending phishing emails
4. Exploitation
   • Execute code on victim's system.
   • E.g. arbitrary code execution, authentication and authorization attacks
5. Installation
   • Installing malware on the asset
   • E.g. backdoor to gain remote access and maintain access in the network
6. Command and control
   • Allows remote manipulation/exploation of victim
   • Done by establishing two-way communication between the victim and the attacker.
   • Evidence is usually hidden using encryption techniques
7. Actions on objectives
   • With hands-on access, intruders accomplish their original goals.
   • E.g. • distrupting network • gaining access to confidential data

Defensive courses of action

1. Detect: determine whether an attacker is poking around
2. Deny: prevent information disclosure and unauthorized access
3. Disrupt: stop or change outbound traffic (to attacker)
4. Degrade: counter-attack command and control
5. Deceive: interfere with command and control
6. Contain: network segmentation changes

Threat identification

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)

• Concept in terrorism and cyber security studies
• Identifies patterns of behavior of the threat actors (= bad guys)
• Aids in
  • counterintelligence for threat prediction and detection
  • implementing defenses
  • profiling threat actors e.g. APT groups
• E.g. In 2020 United States federal government data breach, used TTP were stealing SAML tokens to attack SSO infrastructure according to TTP analysis from NSA.
• Read more at NIST Special Publication 800-159

Tactics

• Also called tools in the acronym
• Highest-level description of the behavior
• Describes ways attacker attacks from start to end
• E.g.
  • Way of gathering information e.g. open-source intelligence, social engineering.
  • Way of initial compromise e.g. tools, zero-day vulnerabilities, obfuscation methods

Techniques

• Technical methods used by an attacker
• Gives a more detailed description of behavior in the context of a tactic.
• E.g.
  • social engineering techniques in early stages
  • exploit tools at middle stages
  • and software tools to clear logs to cover tracks at later stages.

Procedures

• Lower-level, highly detailed description in the context of a technique.
• Sequence of actions done by attackers
• E.g. an actor collects business e-mails of target company then launches a spear phishing campaign

Adversary behaviors

• Method or techniques used by attacker to penetrate victim network.
• E.g. using PowerShell, DNS Tunneling, Web Shell etc.

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

• Artifacts observed that indicates computer intrusion with high confidence.
• 4 categories:
  • Email indicators
    • E.g. sender's email address, subject, attachment, links.
  • Network indicators
    • E.g. URLs, domain names, IP addresses, unusual DNS requests
  • Host-based indicators
    • E.g. filenames, file hashes, registry keys, DDLs, mutex
  • Behavioral indicators
    • E.g. memory code injection, remote command execution, document execution PowerShell script.