Attribution Chasm
The Attribution Chasm in cybersecurity refers to the critical, often intractable gap between a raw technical security finding and the conclusive, actionable business context needed to address it effectively.
It is the challenge security teams face when they can identify what the risk is (e.g., a vulnerability, a misconfigured asset, a leaked credential) but cannot definitively determine who owns it, why it matters to the business, or how to prioritize it against other risks.
Characteristics of the Chasm
Technical vs. Business View: Security tools excel at the technical view, providing data like IP addresses, CVE scores, and open ports. However, they fail to bridge the divide to the business view, which requires knowing the internal owner, the asset's compliance status (e.g., is it handling HIPAA data?), and its strategic importance (e.g., is it a server for a core revenue-generating product?).
The Problem of Identity: The chasm is most evident in the difficulty of linking an external digital artifact—such as an anonymous domain registration, an exposed cloud configuration, or an attacker-controlled infrastructure—to a specific, verifiable organizational identity or individual.
Wasted Effort: Analysts who encounter the Attribution Chasm must spend significant time performing manual, investigative work (often called "swivel-chair correlation") to locate asset owners, review legal filings, or consult internal databases. This slow, high-friction process delays remediation, increases operational cost, and hinders the organization's ability to respond quickly to threats.
Resolving the Attribution Chasm is essential for transforming reactive security operations into proactive, business-aligned risk management.
ThreatNG is specifically designed to eliminate the Attribution Chasm by integrating technical security findings with decisive business and legal context. This process yields Legal-Grade Attribution, ensuring that security findings are actionable and tied to specific organizational owners.
ThreatNG’s Approach to Closing the Attribution Chasm
External Discovery
ThreatNG begins by performing purely external unauthenticated discovery and assessment of the attack surface, identifying vulnerabilities and exposures in a manner that an attacker would. This outside-in view provides the objective, technical data (like exposed ports or leaked credentials) that needs context.
Investigation Modules
The primary responsibility for closing the Attribution Chasm rests with the Context Engine™ and the subsequent Certainty Intelligence capability.
Contextual Risk Intelligence (ThreatNG Context Engine™): This patent-backed solution achieves Irrefutable Attribution by using Multi-Source Data Fusion. It iteratively correlates external technical security findings with decisive legal, financial, and operational context, thus eliminating guesswork across the entire digital attack surface.
Certainty Intelligence (ThreatNG Veracity™): This capability resolves the industry’s Contextual Certainty Deficit by transforming ambiguous security findings into irrefutable, actionable proof. This is achieved by the Context Engine™ delivering Legal-Grade Attribution through multi-source correlation of technical risks with decisive legal and financial context.
Intelligence Repositories
The Context Engine™ draws from various intelligence repositories to fuse technical and business context, directly linking exposed assets to corporate realities.
Detailed Examples of Supporting Intelligence:
SEC Form 8-Ks (DarCache 8-K): Provides critical corporate event data for accurate ownership and priority attribution.
ESG Violations (DarCache ESG): Data on Competition, Consumer, Employment, and Financial-related offenses helps elevate the priority of a risk by tying it to areas of great regulatory concern.
Sentiment and Financials module: This uncovers publicly disclosed Lawsuits, Layoff Chatter, and SEC Filings, providing the legal and operational context necessary to definitively attribute a risk to a specific internal function or legal entity.
External Assessment and Security Ratings
The platform integrates this high-certainty data to make assessments actionable and easy to justify.
Detailed Examples of Context Integration:
Policy Management (DarcRadar): This feature ensures the high-certainty evidence provided by the Context Engine™ is customized and strategically prioritized according to the organization's unique risk tolerance and business logic.
External Adversary View: ThreatNG’s assessments directly map to MITRE ATT&CK techniques by uncovering how an adversary might achieve initial access and establish persistence. This provides certainty on the method of exploitation.
Cyber Risk Exposure Rating (A-F): This rating is highly contextual when the Context Engine™ confirms that the exposed asset or vulnerability is tied to a specific business unit experiencing adverse legal or financial events.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
ThreatNG provides Continuous Monitoring of the external attack surface and digital risk. This ensures that the risk attribution remains up to date, reflecting any recent changes in corporate filings or public statements.
Reporting Examples: The Executive and Prioritized Reports include Reasoning to provide context and insights into the identified risk, as well as Recommendations. This output, underpinned by Legal-Grade Attribution, directly empowers security leaders to justify security investments to the boardroom with business context.
Cooperation with Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's ability to definitively close the Attribution Chasm with Legal-Grade Attribution transforms its output into conclusive input for complementary security systems.
Example of ThreatNG Helping:
ThreatNG helps by detecting a sensitive data leak (via Archived Web Pages) that is technically tied to a seemingly insignificant staging server. The Context Engine™ immediately correlates this asset with an internal team using a specific SaaS platform (identified via SaaSqwatch), which was recently mentioned in a high-profile Lawsuit. This correlation eliminates the chasm, allowing the security team to name the internal owner and directly justify immediate action.
Example of ThreatNG and Complementary Solutions Cooperation:
ThreatNG's Subdomain Intelligence detects a risky asset, an Exposed Port on a subdomain used for internal development. The Context Engine™ provides Legal-Grade Attribution by correlating the subdomain's WHOIS data with a specific, key subsidiary mentioned in a recent SEC 8-K Filing.
A complementary GRC Platform could use this Legal-Grade Attribution and the corresponding risk level. The platform would bypass its standard validation queue and automatically create a high-priority compliance ticket against the identified subsidiary, using the SEC 8-K reference as irrefutable evidence of ownership and risk, thus accelerating the policy enforcement process.
