Hacker's Perspective
The Hacker's Perspective is a cybersecurity approach that involves thinking like a malicious actor to identify and understand vulnerabilities in a system before they are exploited. Instead of just building defenses, this mindset focuses on proactively searching for weaknesses and potential attack vectors. It's about moving from a reactive "wait and see" posture to a proactive one.
Core Components of the Hacker's Perspective
Reconnaissance and Information Gathering: Before launching an attack, a hacker first gathers information about their target. This can involve using public sources, known as Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), to find information such as forgotten subdomains, employee social media profiles that reveal their job roles and company technology, or leaked credentials from previous breaches.
Vulnerability Analysis: Once a hacker has gathered information, they systematically look for weaknesses in the target's systems. They might use automated tools to scan for open ports, outdated software with known vulnerabilities, or misconfigured security settings. They also look for less obvious flaws, such as a website's error message that reveals the version of software it's running.
Exploitation: After finding a vulnerability, a hacker will attempt to exploit it to gain unauthorized access. This could involve using a known exploit to take advantage of an unpatched system, or it could be as simple as using leaked credentials from a previous data breach to access another account. The mindset is creative and persistent, with hackers often combining multiple techniques to achieve their goal.
Understanding Motivations: The hacker's perspective also involves understanding what drives an attacker. Motivations can vary from financial gain and corporate espionage to political beliefs or personal grudges. Knowing the potential motivations helps an organization assess its risk profile and tailor its defenses accordingly.
Importance in Cybersecurity
Adopting the hacker's perspective is crucial because it enables security professionals to anticipate threats before they occur. By simulating attacks through penetration testing or proactively hunting for threats, organizations can identify and fix security gaps that traditional defenses might miss. This approach enables an organization to transition from merely reacting to attacks to establishing a truly resilient and proactive security posture.
ThreatNG helps with the Hacker's Perspective by providing an external, adversarial view of an organization's digital footprint. It operates like a malicious actor, without any internal credentials, to find and assess public-facing assets, vulnerabilities, and leaked data before they can be exploited. This proactive approach enables an organization to identify and address security weaknesses from the outside in.
ThreatNG's external discovery is the first step in adopting a hacker's mindset: reconnaissance and information gathering. The platform performs unauthenticated, external discovery to identify all of an organization's internet-facing assets, including those that are forgotten or unknown to the security team. This is key to identifying "shadow IT" or old, forgotten servers that could serve as a low-effort entry point for an attacker.
For example, a marketing department might create a temporary landing page on a subdomain for a campaign and forget to take it down. ThreatNG would discover this subdomain, providing the organization with an asset it didn't know it had and a potential vulnerability to address.
ThreatNG's external assessment capabilities are a central part of the hacker's perspective, as they move from simple asset discovery to vulnerability analysis and prioritization. The platform provides detailed susceptibility scores and risk ratings that reflect the severity of a threat as a hacker would see it.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG can check a subdomain's DNS records and SSL certificate statuses to determine if it is vulnerable to a takeover. For example, if a subdomain's CNAME record points to a decommissioned service, an attacker could claim that service and host a malicious page under the organization's legitimate subdomain.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This assessment is a direct look at a key hacker tactic: finding hardcoded credentials in public code repositories. ThreatNG discovers exposed secrets like API keys, cloud credentials, or security credentials (e.g., SSH keys) that an attacker could use to gain unauthorized access.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score is derived from data points such as exposed sensitive ports, known vulnerabilities, and presence on the dark web. For instance, ThreatNG might identify an exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) port on a server and correlate it with its intelligence on ransomware gangs that actively target RDP for initial access, providing a clear picture of a high-priority threat.
ThreatNG's reports are designed to help security teams prioritize and respond to threats in a manner that aligns with a hacker's opportunistic mindset. The Prioritized Report is key, as it categorizes findings into high, medium, low, and informational risk levels based on factors like impact and exploitability. This enables an organization to concentrate its resources on the most critical vulnerabilities that a hacker is likely to target first.
ThreatNG provides continuous monitoring of an organization’s external attack surface and digital risk. This is vital for maintaining a hacker's perspective, as the attack surface is constantly evolving. If a developer pushes new code with an exposed secret or a new vulnerability is disclosed for a technology the organization uses, ThreatNG's continuous monitoring ensures the security team is promptly alerted, enabling them to act before an attacker does.
ThreatNG's investigation modules enable a deep dive into potential threats, much like a hacker's persistent exploration.
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module is a direct manifestation of the hacker's perspective, as it proactively searches for exposed secrets in public code repositories and online sharing platforms. ThreatNG can find a hardcoded API key in a public GitHub repository, providing a direct path for an attacker to gain access to a critical internal system.
Dark Web Presence: This module monitors for an organization’s mentions on the dark web, including compromised credentials and ransomware events. By discovering that employee credentials are for sale on the dark web, ThreatNG gives the organization the chance to reset passwords and block access before the credentials are used in an attack.
ThreatNG’s continuously updated intelligence repositories, branded as DarCache, provide the raw data that allows for a true hacker's perspective.
DarCache Vulnerability: This repository offers a comprehensive and proactive approach to managing external risks by examining their real-world exploitability, likelihood of exploitation, and potential impact. It contains data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and a list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). This enables ThreatNG to assess not only the technical severity of a vulnerability but also its likelihood of being exploited, which is what a hacker would prioritize.
DarCache Ransomware: This repository tracks over 70 ransomware gangs and their activities. ThreatNG can utilize this data to determine if a discovered vulnerability is a known entry point for a specific ransomware gang, enabling the organization to prioritize mitigation efforts based on a real-world threat.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external, hacker-centric view can be enhanced by working with other cybersecurity solutions that provide internal visibility and controls.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems: ThreatNG can feed its external intelligence into a SIEM. Suppose ThreatNG flags a publicly exposed administrative page. In that case, the SIEM can correlate this external finding with internal login logs to see if there have been any unauthorized login attempts from the exposed page, providing a unified view of the potential attack.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions: If ThreatNG discovers that an administrator's credentials have been compromised on the dark web, a PAM solution can be configured to automatically enforce a password reset and require stronger multi-factor authentication for that account, preventing a potential account takeover. This synergy enables a faster and more effective response.
