Trisha Chakraborty

Shaswata Mitra, Trisha Chakraborty, Subash Neupane et al.

In an increasingly interconnected world, where information is the lifeblood of modern society, regular cyber-attacks sabotage the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of digital systems and information. Additionally, cyber-attacks differ depending on the objective and evolve rapidly to disguise defensive systems. However, a typical cyber-attack demonstrates a series of stages from attack initiation to final resolution, called an attack life cycle. These diverse characteristics and the relentless evolution of cyber attacks have led cyber defense to adopt modern approaches like Machine Learning to bolster defensive measures and break the attack life cycle. Among the adopted ML approaches, Graph Neural Networks have emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the effectiveness of defensive measures due to their ability to process and learn from heterogeneous cyber threat data. In this paper, we look into the application of GNNs in aiding to break each stage of one of the most renowned attack life cycles, the Lockheed Martin Cyber Kill Chain. We address each phase of CKC and discuss how GNNs contribute to preparing and preventing an attack from a defensive standpoint. Furthermore, We also discuss open research areas and further improvement scopes.

Shaswata Mitra, Subash Neupane, Trisha Chakraborty et al.

Security Operations Center (SoC) analysts gather threat reports from openly accessible global threat repositories and tailor the information to their organization's needs, such as developing threat intelligence and security policies. They also depend on organizational internal repositories, which act as private local knowledge database. These local knowledge databases store credible cyber intelligence, critical operational and infrastructure details. SoCs undertake a manual labor-intensive task of utilizing these global threat repositories and local knowledge databases to create both organization-specific threat intelligence and mitigation policies. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the capability to process diverse knowledge sources efficiently. We leverage this ability to automate this organization-specific threat intelligence generation. We present LocalIntel, a novel automated threat intelligence contextualization framework that retrieves zero-day vulnerability reports from the global threat repositories and uses its local knowledge database to determine implications and mitigation strategies to alert and assist the SoC analyst. LocalIntel comprises two key phases: knowledge retrieval and contextualization. Quantitative and qualitative assessment has shown effectiveness in generating up to 93% accurate organizational threat intelligence with 64% inter-rater agreement.