ATT&CKcon Power Hour Presentations

In early 2018, Red Canary adopted MITRE ATT&CK as the common language that they would use to categorize threats, measure detection coverage, and communicate about malicious behaviors. In the intervening years, they’ve relied on the framework to develop open source tools like Atomic Red Team and help security teams prioritize their defensive efforts with blogs and our annual Threat Detection Report.

In early 2020, MITRE announced that ATT&CK would be expanding its original taxonomy of tactics and techniques to include sub-techniques. In the months that followed MITRE's announcement, Red Canary’s research, intelligence, and detection engineering teams painstakingly remapped their library of thousands of behavioral analytics to sub-techniques. In doing so, they improved their correlational logic, experimented with the idea of conditional technique mapping, and, unfortunately, rendered the 2020 Threat Detection Report out-of-date.

In this talk from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on October 9, 2020, Brian discusses how refactoring for sub-techniques offered us the opportunity to apply all the lessons learned in more than two years of operationalizing ATT&CK. He also explores how Red Canary has remodeled its ATT&CK mapping to allow for added flexibility and human input and shows what happens when the Red Canary applied their new sub-technique mappings to the 2020 Threat Detection Report.

This presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on October 9, 2020, explores the application of the MITRE ATT&CK and PRE-ATT&CK matrices in cybercrime education and research. Specifically, Rege and Bleiman demonstrate the mapping of the PRE-ATT&CK matrix to social engineering case studies as an experiential learning project in an upper-level cybercrime liberal arts course. It thus allows students to understand the alignment process of threat intelligence to the PRE-ATT&CK framework and also learn about its usefulness/limitations. The talk also discusses the mapping of the ATT&CK matrix, tactics, techniques, software, and groups for two cybercrime datasets created by collating publicly disclosed incidents: (i) critical infrastructure ransomware (CIRW) incidents, and (ii) social engineering (SE) incidents. For the CIRW dataset, 39% of the strains mapped onto the ATT&CK software. For the SE dataset, 49% of the groups and 65% of the techniques map on to the MITRE framework. This helps the researchers identify the framework's usefulness/limitations and also helps our datasets connect to richer information that may not otherwise be available in the publicly disclosed incidents.

Adversary emulation is commonly used to validate security controls and is considered one of the most popular use-cases for the ATT&CK framework. However, emulating adversary TTPs on production environments is often very limited in testing scope and frequency, and such practice may cause unwanted business disruption. In this talk from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on October 9, 2020, Hart presents a different approach to testing controls against ATT&CK. He demonstrates how it is possible to provide data-based methods to evaluate the exploitability of ATT&CK techniques by gathering information from the network, endpoint, and services; this unique approach does not emulate any sort of malicious action, thus reducing the potential of causing business disruption to the minimum. Hart also outlines a new open-source guideline based on ATT&CK mitigations, that security teams can use to assess their security posture non-intrusively and at scale.

How do you detect abnormal activities based on frequency, for example, a suspicious number of sign-ins (leading to a brute force attack), suspicious amount of data transfer (leading to a data exfiltration), and malicious scanning or discovering activities? Usually, you would count the frequency of the activity and if this number exceeds a pre-defined threshold then you would consider it abnormal/attack. The problem here is the definition of this threshold (and the reduction of false positives and negatives). Some practitioners set this threshold to 5, others to 10, and in some situations, to 30 or even higher. The remaining question is how to obtain a statistically sounding threshold? In this talk from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on October 9, 2020, Jair Santanna answers this question by using a half-century-old statistical method to define such a dynamic threshold (John Tukey’s "honestly significant difference"-HSD). Northwave has implemented this method in a production environment over several ATT&CK techniques using the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) from Microsoft, Azure Sentinel. Northwave’s scripts are publicly available. In this presentation, Santanna sheds light on dynamic thresholds for security monitoring and discuss how to move forward with this challenging old problem.

Opportunistically targeted ransomware deployments, aka Big Game Hunting (BGH), have caused a distinct disruption in the mechanics of monetizing crimeware compromises. This strategy has become the “end game” for the majority of organized cybercrime organizations, and one effect of this shift is the increased emphasis on enterprise-level targets. In this talk from the MITRE ATT&CKCon Power Hour session on October 9, 2020, Levene walks us through research about how a specific BGH threat actor pursues entry points, gains its foothold, pivots, and deploys payloads to maximize their financial gains with minimal effort - and infrastructure! You’ll walk away with an understanding of the latest BGH TTPs seen in enterprise environments, and how they map to the ATT&CK framework so you can build this research into your threat detection strategy and enhance your defenses.

Jack Burns is a Lead Cybersecurity Engineer at MITRE and the Lead for MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud. He’s also a red team developer and lead for ATT&CK Evaluations, using his skills in software engineering and adversary emulation. Previously, he was a tech lead at HubSpot on the Infrastructure Security team where he focused on red teaming and building detections in the cloud environment. This presentation is from the MITRE ATT&Ckcon Power Hour session held on October 9, 2020.

In this presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on November 12, Allie discusses how the Cybereason research team uses both MITRE ATT&CK and MITRE ATT&CK for Mobile to map and communicate new malware to the larger security community. Teams use the MITRE ATT&CK framework to share techniques, tactics, and procedures with their team and the community at large. This knowledge base has been incredibly beneficial for the development of specific threat models and methodologies in the private sector, in government, and in the cybersecurity product and service community. Many of these uses have centered around traditional endpoints like laptops and workstations. However, the MITRE ATT&CK team has also created a cutting-edge portion of their framework: MITRE ATT&CK for Mobile.

One of the most recent pieces of malware they have found is EventBot, a mobile banking trojan that targets Android devices and the financial services applications on them, including popular apps like Paypal Business, Revolut, Barclays, UniCredit, CapitalOne UK, HSBC UK, Santander UK, TransferWise, Coinbase, paysafecard, and many more. In this talk, learn about this specific attack, intended targets, a timeline of the attack, and the MITRE ATT&CK for Mobile mapping. Learn why the Cybereason team map to MITRE ATT&CK and MITRE ATT&CK for Mobile and what benefits it has given them and their interactions with the community.

The team at Expel has been migrating to the cloud for the last 10 years, but as usual, security has lagged behind. Which means we don't have a comprehensive detection and response framework for cloud like we do with the Enterprise ATT&CK matrix. Cloud has evolved into a complex beast as technologies and concepts - like Infrastructure As Code, Containers, Kubernetes and so forth - have emerged. These new attack surfaces have been added that introduce additional challenges to detection and response in our cloud environments. We don't know what we don't know about attack life cycles in the cloud. In this presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on November 12, 2020, Anthony shares some interesting lessons learned so far when it comes to finding bad guys in the cloud.

Writing and deploying custom detections with high efficacy is one of the most important goals of any SIRT team. It involves multiple stages, starting from developing a detection hypothesis, to writing the detection query, and validating it against a simulated true positive scenario. With ever-changing threat landscape and hybrid cloud environments, the process can be intensive and overwhelming. In this presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on November 12, 2020, Nitya talks about how we can leverage MITRE ATT&CK to not only simplify detection engineering but make it more efficient. The presentation will also include a demo on how to build a detection query, written in KQL(Kusto Query Languauge), for an ATT&CK technique from MITRE Cloud Matrix.

The market for Security products is flooded with vendors offering all sorts of solutions, and organizations are spending a record amount of money defending their environments. Nevertheless, an increasing number of breaches are reported each year, resulting in organizations spending millions of dollars to remediate them. The Security industry responds with more products, all offering to stop the next breach, and the cycle continues. In this presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on November 12, 2020, Matt discusses what VMware is doing internally to address this fundamental flaw in the Security industry and how they are leveraging the MITRE ATT&CK framework to reshape how we think about security.

In this presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on November 12, 2020 Jamie Williams and Mike Hartley from MITRE discuss the process for merging PRE-ATT&CK and adding two new tactics to Enterprise ATT&CK - Reconnaissance and Resource Development.

No one can deny the tremendous impact that ATT&CK had on the cybersecurity industry, nor the usefulness of having a good Threat Library at your disposal. But the question Valentina gets asked over and over by people from small companies is always the same: “How could I leverage threat intelligence using ATT&CK with limited time and resources?” And so far, there hasn't been a good answer. That’s why she decided to come up with the Threat Mapping Catalogue (TMC), a tool that combines the power of the mappings already available in the ATT&CK website, TRAM and the ATT&CK Navigator, to better process, consume and incorporate new mappings while organizing them around different categories.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on December 11, 2020.

Good analysts (and good human beings) change their minds based on new information. In this presentation, Katie will share how her perspectives on ATT&CK have changed since moving from ATT&CK team member to ATT&CK end-user. She will discuss how her ideas about coverage, procedures, and detection creation have evolved and why those perspectives matter. Katie will also share practical examples from observed threats to help explain the nuances of her perspectives. Attendees should expect to leave this presentation with a better understanding of how to handle challenges they’re likely to face when navigating their own ATT&CK journey.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on December 11, 2020.

No matter how sophisticated and thorough your security precautions may be, you cannot assume your security measures are impenetrable. This is why you need a threat hunting program in place. But how can we implement a proper threat hunting program and run it efficiently? In this talk, we will uncover how to sharpen your threat hunting strategy by leveraging ATT&CK. Ultimately, we’ll be demonstrating how effectively employing the hunting methodology in the real-world battlefield, fighting against well-known cyber espionage actors who strongly focus on Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on December 11, 2020.

Design Basis Threat (DBT) is a concept introduced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It is a profile of the type, composition, and capabilities of an adversary. DBT is the key input nuclear power plants use for the design of systems against acts of radiological sabotage and theft of special nuclear material. The NRC expects its licensees, nuclear power plants, to demonstrate that they can defend against the DBT. Currently, cyber is included in DBTs simply as a prescribed list of IT centric security controls. Using MITRE’s ATT&CK framework, Cyber DBTs can be created that are specific to the facility, its material, or adversary activities.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on December 11, 2020.

Otis Alexander is a Principal Cyber Security Engineer at the MITRE Corporation and has worked in the areas of security engineering and research, analytic development, and adversary modeling and emulation. Otis is a co-creator of ATT&CK for ICS and has been leading the project since its inception. He also leads an effort to bring MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations to ICS security vendors providing anomaly and threat detection solutions. He advocates for network and host visibility in operational technology environments to increase the situational awareness of defenders.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on December 11, 2020.

Cyber security is inherently a function of risk management. Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by the effort to reduce those risks in a coordinated and economical manner (thanks wikipedia!). In this talk, Daniel will be going over some strategies for measuring and prioritizing your cyber risks using MITRE ATT&CK . He'll discuss some lessons learned in atomic testing of techniques vs attack chaining as well as what to measure and how to make decisions with that data.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on January 14, 2021.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is the industry standard to dissect cyberattacks into used techniques. At McAfee, all attack information is disseminated into different categories, including ATT&CK techniques. What results from this exercise is an extensive repository of techniques used in cyberattacks that goes back many years. Much can be learned from looking at historical attack data, but how can we piece all this information together to identify new relationships between threats and attacks? In her recent efforts, Valentine has embraced analyzing ATT&CK data in graphical representations. One lesson learned is that it is not just about merely mapping out attacks and techniques used into graphs, but the strength lies in applying different algorithms to answer specific questions. In this presentation, Valentine will showcase the results and techniques obtained from her research journey using graph and graph algorithms.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on January 14, 2021.

Adversaries are humans as well. They have objectives, deadlines and resources for programming.

In a sense, very similar to corporations grounded in the economics of effort vs time vs results. Now understanding techniques is one thing, taking it a step further and understanding what the economic impact is of using certain techniques is another. Developing tools takes time. For example, developing a custom process injection module might take days or weeks to develop, where using an open source tool could prevent extensive development costs incurred.

This talk explores the economic considerations for defending against techniques used by adversaries. It explores fundamental considerations all referenced to MITRE’s ATT&CK framework. The objective of this talk is to inspire defensive strategies designed to impact cost incurred by adversaries to perform compromises.

This talk is from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session held on January 14, 2021.

In this presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour held on January 14, 2021, MITRE ATT&CK lead Adam Pennington gives an update on the current and future state of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.