Situational Awareness
In the context of cybersecurity, Situational Awareness (SA) is the ability to perceive one's environment, understand the meaning of those elements, and project their status within the digital landscape of an organization. It's more than just collecting data; it's about transforming raw information into actionable intelligence that empowers security professionals to make informed decisions and proactively defend against threats.
Let's break down each component in detail within the cybersecurity context:
1. Perception (Level 1 SA): This is the initial stage, involving the continuous monitoring and gathering of relevant information from the cybersecurity environment. It's about being aware of what's happening in the present moment. In cybersecurity, this includes:
Network Monitoring: Observing network traffic patterns, bandwidth usage, connection attempts, and protocol anomalies. This involves analyzing logs from firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), routers, and switches.
Endpoint Monitoring: Tracking activity on individual devices (desktops, laptops, servers, mobile devices), including running processes, resource utilization, file system changes, registry modifications, and user behavior. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools play a crucial role in this context.
Security Sensor Data: Collecting alerts and logs from various security tools like antivirus software, web application firewalls (WAFs), security information and event management (SIEM) systems, and vulnerability scanners.
Log Analysis: Ingesting and examining logs from operating systems, applications, databases, and cloud services to identify suspicious activities or deviations from normal behavior.
Threat Intelligence Feeds: Receiving and processing information about known threats, attack vectors, indicators of compromise (IOCs), and threat actors from external sources.
Physical Security Events (where relevant): Monitoring physical access logs, surveillance footage, and environmental controls that could impact cyber assets.
User Activity Monitoring: Observing user actions, login attempts, access patterns, and data handling practices to detect insider threats or compromised accounts.
Cloud Environment Monitoring: Tracking resource utilization, configuration changes, access controls, and compliance status within cloud platforms.
The key aspect of perception is the breadth and depth of data collection. A lack of comprehensive visibility results in blind spots and a reduced ability to detect threats.
2. Comprehension (Level 2 SA): This stage involves making sense of the perceived information. It's about understanding the meaning of the collected data and recognizing patterns, relationships, and context. In cybersecurity, this means:
Correlation and Analysis: Connecting seemingly disparate events and alerts to identify broader attack campaigns or malicious activities. SIEM systems are crucial for this, as they correlate logs from various sources to provide a comprehensive view.
Contextualization: Understanding the significance of an event within the organization's specific environment. For example, an unusual login from a foreign country might be benign for a globally distributed team but highly suspicious for a local business.
Anomaly Detection: Identifying deviations from established baselines of normal behavior. This requires understanding what constitutes "normal" for network traffic, user activity, system performance, and application behavior.
Threat Identification: Recognizing patterns and indicators that match known attack techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs) associated with specific threat actors. This leverages threat intelligence and knowledge of attack methodologies.
Vulnerability Assessment: Understanding the potential impact of identified vulnerabilities in the context of the organization's assets and the current threat landscape.
Asset Inventory and Management: Knowing what assets exist, their criticality, their interdependencies, and their security posture is crucial for understanding the potential impact of a security event.
Understanding Business Processes: Recognizing how cyber events might impact critical business functions and prioritizing responses accordingly.
Comprehension transforms raw data into information by providing context and imbuing it with meaning. Without adequate comprehension, security teams are overwhelmed by alerts without understanding their significance.
3. Projection (Level 3 SA): This is the highest level of SA, involving the ability to anticipate future events based on the perceived information and the understanding gained in the comprehension stage. It's about understanding the implications of the current situation and predicting potential future states. In cybersecurity, this includes:
Threat Forecasting: Predicting the likely evolution of an ongoing attack, potential targets, and the attacker's next steps based on current activity and historical patterns.
Risk Assessment: Anticipating potential future vulnerabilities or attack vectors based on trends, emerging threats, and changes in the organization's infrastructure or applications.
Impact Analysis: Projecting the potential consequences of a successful attack, including data breaches, service disruptions, financial losses, and reputational damage.
Predictive Analytics: Using historical data and machine learning techniques to forecast future security incidents or identify systems at higher risk.
Scenario Planning: Developing "what-if" scenarios to anticipate potential future threats and prepare appropriate response strategies.
Understanding Attack Trends: Staying informed about emerging attack techniques and adapting security defenses proactively.
Projection allows security teams to move from a reactive to a proactive stance. By anticipating future threats and their potential impact, organizations can implement preventative measures and be better prepared to respond effectively.
In summary, Situational Awareness in cybersecurity is a continuous cycle of:
Perceiving the various elements of the cyber environment.
Comprehending the meaning and relationships of those elements.
Projecting their future status and potential impact.
Achieving effective cybersecurity situational awareness requires:
Comprehensive Data Collection: Gathering relevant data from all critical systems and security tools.
Robust Analysis Capabilities: Employing tools and techniques to correlate, contextualize, and analyze the collected data.
Skilled Security Personnel: Having trained analysts who can interpret data, identify threats, and make informed decisions.
Effective Communication and Collaboration: Sharing relevant information across security teams and with other stakeholders.
Continuous Improvement: Regularly reviewing and refining SA processes and technologies to adapt to the evolving threat landscape.
By cultivating strong situational awareness, cybersecurity professionals can move beyond simply reacting to alerts and instead proactively defend their organizations against the ever-present and evolving threats in the digital world. They can anticipate attacks, understand their potential impact, and make timely, informed decisions to mitigate risks and protect valuable assets.
Here’s how ThreatNG addresses cybersecurity situational awareness:
ThreatNG excels in external discovery by performing unauthenticated discovery without needing connectors.
This is crucial for situational awareness because it provides the foundational layer of perception.
By discovering all externally facing assets (web applications, subdomains, APIs, cloud services, etc.), ThreatNG gives security professionals a comprehensive view of their digital environment.
For example, ThreatNG's discovery of SwaggerHub instances (mentioned in the Domain Overview section) directly enhances awareness of an organization's API footprint, which is often a blind spot.
ThreatNG offers a comprehensive range of external assessment capabilities that enhance both perception and comprehension of situational awareness.
It assesses various risks, including:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility
Brand Damage Susceptibility
Data Leak Susceptibility
Cyber Risk Exposure
Code Secret Exposure
Cloud and SaaS Exposure
ESG Exposure
Supply Chain & Third Party Exposure
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility
Mobile App Exposure
These assessments provide critical information about an organization's security posture, vulnerabilities, and potential attack vectors.
Examples:
The "Mobile App Exposure" assessment discovers mobile apps in various marketplaces and analyzes them for embedded credentials and secrets. This provides security teams with a clear understanding of potential risks associated with their mobile applications.
The "Code Secret Exposure" assessment identifies public code repositories and detects exposed sensitive data, such as API keys and credentials. This helps security professionals understand the risks associated with code leaks.
Furthermore, ThreatNG also identifies "Positive Security Indicators," providing a balanced view of an organization's security by highlighting existing security controls.
3. Reporting
ThreatNG's reporting capabilities are essential for comprehension and facilitate projection.
It offers various reports, including Executive, Technical, Prioritized, and Security Ratings reports.
These reports present the assessed information in a structured and understandable format, enabling security professionals to grasp the organization's security situation quickly.
The reports also include a Knowledgebase with risk levels, reasoning, recommendations, and reference links. This contextual information enables security teams to understand the significance of the findings and informs their subsequent decisions.
ThreatNG's continuous monitoring of the external attack surface, digital risk, and security ratings aligns with the perception aspect of situational awareness.
It ensures that security professionals have an up-to-date view of their evolving threat landscape.
This is crucial because the external attack surface is dynamic; new vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats can emerge at any time.
ThreatNG's investigation modules are critical for comprehension and projection, enabling in-depth analysis and threat hunting.
The modules provide detailed intelligence on various aspects of the external attack surface:
Domain Intelligence: Provides overview, DNS, Email, WHOIS, and Subdomain Intelligence. For example, Domain Overview includes SwaggerHub instances, giving insight into API documentation.
Code Repository Exposure: Helps discover exposed code repositories with sensitive information.
Mobile Application Discovery: Identifies and analyzes mobile apps and their contents.
Search Engine Exploitation: Assesses susceptibility to information exposure via search engines.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: Identifies sanctioned/unsanctioned cloud services and SaaS implementations.
Online Sharing Exposure: Monitors code-sharing platforms for organizational data leaks.
Sentiment and Financials: Provides insights from lawsuits, SEC filings, and ESG violations.
Archived Web Pages: Discovers sensitive information in archived web pages.
Dark Web Presence: Tracks mentions, ransomware events, and compromised credentials on the dark web.
Technology Stack: Identifies technologies used by the organization.
Examples of how these modules enhance situational awareness:
The Dark Web Presence module helps security teams understand if their credentials have been compromised (perception) and allows them to anticipate potential account takeover attacks (projection).
The Cloud and SaaS Exposure module identifies unsanctioned cloud services, enabling security teams to assess the risk of data leakage and enforce security policies, thereby promoting comprehension and informed projection.
ThreatNG's intelligence repositories feed into all three levels of situational awareness: perception, comprehension, and projection.
These repositories contain a wealth of information on:
Dark web data
Compromised credentials
Ransomware events and groups
Known vulnerabilities
ESG violations
Bug bounty programs
SEC Form 8-Ks
Mobile Apps (and embedded secrets)
This information provides valuable context for understanding threats and predicting potential attacks.
For instance, by combining knowledge of ransomware gang activity (from the intelligence repository) with the identification of exposed remote access services (from investigation modules), security teams can anticipate and prevent ransomware attacks.
7. Working with Complementary Solutions
The document does not explicitly detail ThreatNG's integrations with specific complementary solutions.
However, the platform's capabilities suggest it would work well with:
SIEM systems: ThreatNG's findings can feed into SIEMs to provide external attack surface context to internal security events, improving correlation and threat detection.
Vulnerability Management systems: ThreatNG's external vulnerability assessments can complement internal vulnerability scans, providing a more complete picture of an organization's vulnerability posture.
SOAR platforms: ThreatNG's threat intelligence and assessment data can be used to automate security responses and workflows within SOAR platforms.
By providing comprehensive external attack surface visibility and intelligence, ThreatNG enhances the effectiveness of other security tools and contributes to a more holistic security posture.
