Intelligence Foundations – Foundations and Lifecycle

The first step in responding to a cyber attack is gathering evidence (intelligence) during all phases of an attack from multiple data sources. In this video we’ll examine the foundations and lifecycle of intelligence gathering focusing on the following areas:

• IoA (Indicators of Attack) – continuous monitoring of a wide range of things from the physical to server performance problems to suspicious network activity.
• IoC (Indicators of Compromise) – direct evidence of a compromise such as permission changes, data exfiltration and hiding, AV disabling, and firewall rule changes.
• TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) – operational taks indicating a problem such as a procedure that no longer works.
• CRITs (Collaborative Research into Threats) – open source databases containing malware repositories such as the MITRE webpage.
• Raw data vs. aggregated data – raw data from network devices of a threat feed is typically in no usable form and must be examined and filtered through other processes to be meaningful. Aggregated data is pieced together from various sources. Alone may not be suspicious, but when aggregated may tell a different story.
• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) – devices used to monitor and log events. Must be tuned to minimize false positives.
• IDPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention System) – devices to detect and prevent attacks respectively. Typically located at firewalls.