Threat Landscape Awareness
Threat landscape awareness in cybersecurity is the understanding an organization has of the current and evolving cyber threats that could impact its digital assets. It involves more than just knowing about general threats; it's about having specific knowledge relevant to the organization's industry, technology stack, and risk profile.
Here's a detailed breakdown:
Identifying Threat Actors: This includes understanding the potential attackers. Are they financially motivated cybercriminals, nation-state actors engaged in espionage, hacktivists with a political agenda, or insider threats? Knowing the threat actor helps predict their likely tactics and targets.
Understanding Attack Vectors: This means knowing how attackers might try to gain access. Common attack vectors include phishing emails, malware infections, exploiting software vulnerabilities, and social engineering. Awareness involves staying current on which vectors are most prevalent and effective.
Analyzing Malware and Tools: Knowing the specific malware, tools, and exploits that threat actors use is crucial. This could range from common ransomware strains to sophisticated zero-day exploits. Understanding how these tools work helps in developing defenses.
Keeping Track of Vulnerabilities: This involves knowing about weaknesses in software, hardware, and systems that attackers could exploit. This includes not only known vulnerabilities but also emerging vulnerabilities and zero-day threats.
Monitoring Indicators of Compromise (IOCs): IOCs are forensic artifacts that indicate a system or network may have been compromised. Examples include unusual file hashes, suspicious IP addresses, or anomalous network traffic. Awareness involves actively monitoring for these IOCs.
Recognizing Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs): TTPs refer to how threat actors conduct their attacks. This includes the specific steps they take, the tools they use, and the patterns they follow. Understanding TTPs allows for more effective detection and response.
Considering the Broader Context: Threat landscape awareness also involves understanding the broader context in which threats operate. This might include geopolitical factors, industry trends, and emerging technologies.
Threat landscape awareness is a continuous process of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating information to help an organization anticipate and defend against cyber threats.
Here’s how ThreatNG enhances threat landscape awareness, emphasizing its modules and potential synergies with complementary solutions:
ThreatNG's Help: ThreatNG's external discovery capabilities provide a fundamental layer of threat landscape awareness by identifying an organization's externally facing digital assets. It performs "purely external unauthenticated discovery" without needing connectors, replicating an attacker's viewpoint.
Example: ThreatNG discovers all subdomains, web applications, APIs, and cloud services associated with an organization. This comprehensive inventory reveals potential entry points and attack vectors that might otherwise be unknown.
Synergy with Complementary Solutions: This external discovery data can be fed into Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) to provide context for threat intelligence. For example, knowing all subdomains helps the TIP assess the potential impact of a phishing campaign that spoofs a specific subdomain.
ThreatNG's Help: ThreatNG's external assessment modules provide detailed insights into an organization's security posture and vulnerabilities, which are crucial for threat landscape awareness.
Examples:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses web applications' susceptibility to hijacking, revealing potential weaknesses in authentication, authorization, or input validation.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: It evaluates the risk of subdomain takeovers, which can be exploited for phishing or malware distribution.
Data Leak Susceptibility: ThreatNG identifies potential sources of data leaks, such as exposed cloud storage or code repositories, helping organizations understand their data breach risks.
Mobile App Exposure: ThreatNG discovers and analyzes mobile apps for security vulnerabilities, such as embedded credentials or insecure data storage.
Synergy with Complementary Solutions: Vulnerability Management solutions can use ThreatNG's external assessment data to prioritize internal scanning and remediation efforts. For instance, if ThreatNG identifies a high susceptibility to web application hijacking, the vulnerability scanner can focus on those specific applications.
3. Reporting
ThreatNG's Help: ThreatNG's reporting capabilities deliver structured and actionable information about identified risks and vulnerabilities, enhancing comprehension of the threat landscape.
Example: ThreatNG provides "Prioritized (High, Medium, Low, and Informational)" reports, enabling security teams to focus on the most critical threats and allocate resources effectively.
Synergy with Complementary Solutions: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems can use ThreatNG's reports to correlate external threat intelligence with internal security events. This correlation can improve the detection of attacks that exploit known external vulnerabilities.
ThreatNG's Help: ThreatNG's continuous monitoring of the external attack surface provides ongoing threat landscape awareness. It helps organizations stay informed about changes that could introduce new threats.
Example: ThreatNG continuously monitors for new subdomains, exposed services, or changes in security configurations, alerting security teams to potential risks.
Synergy with Complementary Solutions: Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms can automate responses to ThreatNG's monitoring alerts. For example, if ThreatNG detects a new, unauthorized subdomain, the SOAR platform can trigger an automated workflow to investigate and potentially block it.
ThreatNG's Help: ThreatNG's investigation modules provide detailed information on various aspects of the external attack surface, enabling in-depth threat analysis and a deeper understanding of the threat landscape.
Examples:
Domain Intelligence: Provides insights into domain registration, DNS records, and related information, which can help identify phishing or domain spoofing risks.
Sensitive Code Exposure: Discovers exposed credentials and secrets in public code repositories, which are valuable for understanding potential attack vectors.
Search Engine Exploitation: Analyzes an organization's susceptibility to information exposure through search engines.
Synergy with Complementary Solutions: Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) can use the detailed information from ThreatNG's investigation modules to enrich their threat intelligence feeds. For example, indicators of compromise (IOCs) extracted from ThreatNG's analysis (e.g., malicious domains, exposed credentials) can be incorporated into TIPs.
ThreatNG's Help: ThreatNG's "Intelligence Repositories (Branded as DarCache: Data Reconnaissance Cache)" provide curated threat intelligence data, enhancing threat landscape awareness.
Examples:
DarCache Vulnerability: Provides information on vulnerabilities, including exploitability and potential impact.
DarCache Dark Web: Provides intelligence on dark web activity, including mentions of the organization and compromised credentials.
DarCache Ransomware: Tracks ransomware groups and their activities, helping organizations understand the ransomware threat landscape.
Synergy with Complementary Solutions: TIPs can integrate ThreatNG's intelligence repositories to enhance their threat feeds. For example, DarCache Vulnerability data can help TIPs prioritize alerts based on the likelihood of vulnerability exploitation.
