Why Threat Actors Matter
The intelligence community has an ongoing debate about the importance of identifying threat actors ranging from individuals to highly organized Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. Businesses, governments, and individuals are targeted by cybercriminals every day whose tactics are continually evolving. Identifying these adversaries has become a polarizing topic among security professionals. Organizations can unlock insights into the attackers’ motivations, refine their defensive strategies, and allocate their cybersecurity resources more effectively by pinpointing who is behind these cyberattacks.
Those who believe that threat actors are as important as their tactics, techniques, and procedures argue that this knowledge protects digital assets and empowers organizations to anticipate, prepare, and respond with precision to cyber threats now and in the future.
One of the major arguments for threat actor identification is that different threat actors have different motivations, including financial, political, ideological, or espionage-related. Understanding the actors’ motivations help predict potential targets and the nature of the threats, allowing for more tailored defenses. An example: Each threat actor group may employ unique tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). By identifying these groups, organizations can adjust their security strategies to defend against the specific methods these actors are known to use. This is why many organizations are employing MITRE ATT&CK as a specification of actor behaviors to standardize historical intelligence as information to future defenses.
The goal is to have organizations predict probable future threats and take proactive measures to prevent them by responding to the behavior and evolution of specific threat actors. This includes preparing defenses against new malware variants, phishing strategies, or ransomware techniques before they are actively used in attacks. When organizations identify and understand threat actors’ activities, they can share this information with other entities and cybersecurity groups. This collaboration can lead to a more robust defense for a single organization, a smaller intelligence sharing community, and across global sectors and geographies.
Going further, understanding who was known to be or was probably behind the attack can help in the forensic analysis and incident response processes after a security breach. The information of how or what was likely done can guide the recovery efforts and help devise strategies to prevent similar incidents in the future. This is why many industries have legal and regulatory requirements to report and mitigate cybersecurity threats, to share insights from one breach to prevent future breaches. Identifying the threat actors helps in these reporting and compliance processes by providing detailed information about the nature, source, and motivations of the attacks.
Threat intelligence identifies threat actors by providing the necessary context, insights, and data to understand who is attacking, why they might be doing so, and how they operate. Threat intelligence helps interpret the vast amounts of data generated by security systems like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus programs. Contextualizing anomalies and indicators of compromise (IoCs) within a larger framework of known threat actor behaviors allows organizations to understand better whether these anomalies could be attributed to specific threat actors. TIPs provide detailed profiles of threat actors, including their TTPs, preferred targets, motives, and historical activities. These profiles help security teams quickly match observed activities in their systems with known patterns of specific threat actors, enhancing the accuracy and speed of identification.
Threat intelligence feeds often include up-to-date IoCs associated with different threat actors, such as specific malware signatures, IP addresses, URLs, and hash values used in attacks. Intelligence feeds are also more frequently referencing TTPs by the MITRE ATT&CK codes, and advanced TIPs are automating the IoC and TTP associations to threat actors to inform defenses. By integrating this intelligence into security tools, organizations can swiftly identify when a known threat actor’s tools or methods are being used against them. Threat intelligence offers predictive insights about potential future attacks by analyzing trends and patterns in threat actor behavior. This includes predictions about who might be targeted next and how these attacks might evolve. This forward-looking capability allows organizations to prepare defenses against anticipated actions by known threat actors.
Analyst1 uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze data from various sources, track threat actor profiles, monitor IoCs, and organize tactics by MITRE ATT&CK or custom TTP definitions. This proactive approach enables faster detection and automates threat response by allowing you to anticipate and mitigate potential cyber-attacks before they occur.
