Offensive Security: Towards Proactive Threat Hunting via Adversary Emulation

Abstract

Attackers increasingly seek to compromise organizations and their critical data with advanced stealthy methods, often utilising legitimate tools. In the main, organisations employ reactive approaches for cyber security, focused on rectifying immediate incidents and preventing repeat attacks, through protections such as vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT) security information and event management (SIEM), firewalls, anti-spam/anti-malware solutions and system patches. Such system have weaknesses in addressing modern modern stealthy attacks. Proactive approaches, have been seen as part of the solution to this problem. However, approaches such as VAPT have limited scope and only works with threats that have already been discovered. Promising methods such as threat hunting are gaining momentum, enabling organisations to identify and rapidly respond to any potential attacks, though they have been criticised for their significant cost. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid model for uncovering tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) through offensive security, specifically threat hunting via adversary emulation. The proposed technique is based on a novel approach of inducing adversary emulation (mapping each respective phase) model inside the threat hunting approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach uses threat hunting via adversary emulation and has countervailing effects on hunting advance level threats. Moreover, the threat detection ability of the proposed approach utilizes minimum resources. The proposed approach can be used to develop the offensive security-aware environment for organizations to uncover advanced attack mechanisms and test their ability for attack detection.

Keywords

• Offensive security
• threat hunting
• proactive defense
• red teaming
• adversary emulation
• mitre ATT&CK