A process mining-based method for attacker profiling using the MITRE ATT&CK taxonomy

Cybersecurity intelligence involves gathering and analyzing data to understand cyber adversaries’ capabilities, intentions, and behaviors to establish adequate security measures. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is valuable for gaining insight into cyber threats since it details attacker tactics,...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rodríguez, Marcelo, Betarte, Gustavo, Calegari, Daniel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:Brasil
Institución:Sociedade Brasileira de Computação (SBC)
Repositorio:Journal of internet services and applications (Internet)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:journals-sol.sbc.org.br:article/3902
Acceso en línea:https://journals-sol.sbc.org.br/index.php/jisa/article/view/3902
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Cybersecurity, process mining, attacker behavior, threat intelligence, MITRE ATT&CK Framework
Descripción
Sumario:Cybersecurity intelligence involves gathering and analyzing data to understand cyber adversaries’ capabilities, intentions, and behaviors to establish adequate security measures. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is valuable for gaining insight into cyber threats since it details attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures. However, to fully understand an attacker’s behavior, it is necessary to connect individual tactics. In this context, Process Mining (PM) can be used to analyze runtime events from information systems, thereby discovering causal relations between those events. This article presents a novel approach combining Process Mining with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to discover process models of different attack strategies. Our approach involves mapping low-level system events to corresponding event labels from the MITRE ATT&CK taxonomy, increasing the abstraction level for attacker profiling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using real datasets of human and automated (malware) behavior. This exploration helps to develop more efficient and adaptable security strategies to combat current cyber threats and provides valuable guidelines for future research.