Sorting Through Haystacks to Find CTI Needles
Clouded vision CTI systems are confronted with some major issues ranging from the size of the collection networks to their diversity, which ultimately influence the degree of confidence they can put on their signals. Are they fresh enough and sufficiently reliable to avoid any false positives or any poisoning? Do I risk acting on outdated data? This difference is major since a piece of information is just a decision helper, whereas a piece of actionable information can directly be weaponized against an aggressor. If raw data are the hayfields, information is the haystacks, and needles are the actionable signal. To illustrate the collection networks' size & variety point, without naming anyone in particular, let's imagine a large CDN provider. Your role is to deliver, on a massive scale, content over HTTP(s). This attracts a lot of "attention" and signals, but only on the HTTP layer. Also, any smart attacker will probably avoid probing your IP ranges (which are pub...