Phishing attacks don’t show any sign of slowing down. Per its 2019 Phishing Trends and Intelligence Report, PhishLabs found that total phishing volume rose 40.9 percent over the course of 2018. These attacks targeted a range of organizations, especially financial service companies, email and online service providers and cloud/file hosting firms.
This spring, as the product and security operations teams at AT&T Cybersecurity prepared for the launch of our Managed Threat Detection and Response service, it became obvious to us that the market has many different understandings of what “response” could (and should) mean when evaluating an MDR solution. Customers typically want to know: What incident response capabilities does the underlying technology platform enable?
This research project is part of my Master’s program at the University of San Francisco, where I collaborated with the AT&T Alien Labs team. I would like to share a new approach to automate the extraction of key details from cybersecurity documents. The goal is to extract entities such as country of origin, industry targeted, and malware name. The data is obtained from the AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX) platform: Figure 1: The website otx.alienvault.com.
Once upon a time, threat detection was based on delayed and reactive notifications associated with rudimentary alerting processes: A system failed, a database of your customer information was found for sale on the dark web, an employee admits to wrongdoing, and more. Addressing these threats was a completely reactive process.
With access to more resources than ever before, cybercriminals are rapidly scaling their operations, making every organization a potential target for a cyberattack. And, they are constantly shifting their tactics to exploit new vulnerabilities and slip past perimeter-based controls undetected. Meanwhile, the longer a threat goes undetected in a network environment, the greater the potential for damage through a security breach, data loss, or business downtime and disruption.
Every week, the AT&T Chief Security Office produces a set of videos with helpful information and news commentary for InfoSec practitioners and researchers. I really enjoy them, and you can subscribe to the Youtube channel to stay updated. This is a transcript of a recent feature on ThreatTraq. Watch the video here.
A comprehensive, six-month study released by Proofpoint, in March reports that (oh, to our surprise), attackers are “leveraging legacy protocols and credential dumps to increase the speed and effectiveness of brute force account compromises at scale.” Yikes!! At SCALE! Threat actors design threats aiming at platforms or services which will provide the greatest ROI for them.
Data is a raw material, which is often unstructured, extracted in massive quantity, and requires processing before calling it an information and actionable intelligence. A good example is the Indicators of Compromise (IoCs). A big list of domain names or IP addresses can be ingested into the SIEM system to identify whether this list contains any malicious IP or not.
Threat Intelligence Feeds, in fact, are an actionable threat data related to artifacts or indicators collected from any third-party vendors in order to learn from other company’s visibility and access to enhance your own cyber threat response and awareness. The example of these third-party vendors includes Kaspersky Threat Intelligence and Alient Vault OTX. Threat Intelligence Feeds concentrate on a single area of interest and they are delivered online.
