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.

As the threat landscape continues to expand, having end-to-end visibility across your modern application stack and cloud infrastructures is crucial. Customers cannot afford to have blind spots in their environment and that includes data being ingested from third-party tools.

Rohan Viegas of VMRay explains some of the key factors IT security teams should consider when evaluating a malware analysis sandbox and whether it’s a good fit for their existing SIEM environment. He then outlines how VMRay Analyzer complements and enhances the capabilities of AlienVault’s flagship platform, USM Anywhere.

At AWS re:Invent recently, I spoke to several booth visitors who asked, “What’s new with AlienVault?” It was exciting to talk through some of the improvements we’ve made over the last year and see their eyes widen as the list went on. As our customers know, we regularly introduce new features to USM Anywhere and USM Central to help teams detect and respond to the latest threats.