Shared Responsibility and Configuration Management in the Cloud: SecTor 2020
A number of high-profile data breaches have resulted directly from misconfigured permissions or unpatched vulnerabilities. For instance, the 2017 Equifax breach was the result of exploiting an unpatched flaw in Apache Struts allowing remote code execution. More recently, the Capital One breach last year stemmed from a misconfigured web application ... Read More
MITRE ATT&CK July 2020 Update: Sub-Techniques!
The highly anticipated structural update to the MITRE ATT&CK framework was released July 8th, 2020. After a quiet first half of the year, it appears the ATT&CK team has been putting in lots of work into some significant redesign of the framework’s structure. This update introduces a new layer of ... Read More
The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Impact
Not all attackers are trying to exfiltrate data. In security, we’re all familiar with CIA triad—confidentiality, availability, and integrity. While Exfiltration describes adversarial behavior with the goal of violating confidentiality, attackers may look to manipulate, interrupt, or destroy your systems and data. The Impact tactic describes techniques that adversaries use ... Read More
Introducing the New MITRE ATT&CK Framework for Industrial Control Systems
On January 7th, MITRE released ATT&CK for Industrial Control Systems, a taxonomy of real-world cyber adversarial behavior targeting ICS or industrial control systems. These systems operate critical infrastructure in manufacturing and utility industries, and they are popular targets in financial and espionage motivated attacks. Recent high-profile attacks on industrial control ... Read More
MITRE ATT&CK October Update: Extending to the Cloud
MITRE’s ATT&CK framework is ever evolving. The latest October update extends enterprise coverage to the cloud and adds a considerable list of cloud-specific adversarial techniques. The cloud has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years, as it offers businesses flexibility, reliability and cost-savings. Along with this growth comes new ... Read More
MITRE ATT&CK July 2019 Update
On the last day of July, MITRE released its most recent update to the ATT&CK framework. Compared to the April 2019 update, which saw a new tactic with 14 new Techniques, the July 2019 update is relatively small and centers around restructuring Mitigation content and some minor updates to Groups ... Read More
ATT&CK Structure Part II: From Taxonomy to Ontology
In Part I, I described some structural problems in MITRE’s ATT&CK adversarial behavior framework. We looked at a couple of examples of techniques that vary greatly in terms of abstraction as well as techniques that ought to be classified as parent and sub-technique. Both examples are borne out of the ... Read More
ATT&CK Structure Part I: A Taxonomy of Adversarial Behavior
Following last year’s exceedingly successful inaugural MITRE ATT&CK™ conference, this year’s highly anticipated ATT&CKcon 2.0 conference will be held from Oct 28-30 at MITRE’s McLean headquarters. MITRE’s always open to hearing feedback about the limitations of the ATT&CK framework and how to make ATT&CK more useful. Today, I want to ... Read More
MITRE ATT&CK April 2019 Update
MITRE has released an April 2019 update to its ATT&CK framework. It’s been a year since the last major update featuring a new tactic. There are a number of changes for this year: the most major being the addition of a 12th Tactic, Impact, which contains 14 new Techniques. There ... Read More
How to Evade Detection: Hiding in the Registry
MITRE Corporation’s ATT&CK framework is a living, curated repository of adversarial tactics and techniques based on observations from actual attacks on enterprise networks. It’s a valuable trove of information for security analysts, threat hunters and incident response teams. Today, I’m going to look at a particular method for evading detection, ... Read More

