Looking Beyond IoCs: Automatically Extracting Attack Patterns from External CTI

Abstract

Public and commercial organizations extensively share cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) to prepare systems to defend against existing and emerging cyberattacks. However, traditional CTI has primarily focused on tracking known threat indicators such as IP addresses and domain names, which may not provide long-term value in defending against evolving attacks. To address this challenge, we propose to use more robust threat intelligence signals called attack patterns. LADDER is a knowledge extraction framework that can extract text-based attack patterns from CTI reports at scale. The framework characterizes attack patterns by capturing the phases of an attack in Android and enterprise networks and systematically maps them to the MITRE ATT&CK pattern framework. LADDER can be used by security analysts to determine the presence of attack vectors related to existing and emerging threats, enabling them to prepare defenses proactively. We also present several use cases to demonstrate the application of LADDER in real-world scenarios. Finally, we provide a new, open-access benchmark malware dataset to train future cyberthreat intelligence models.