Unleashing the Dynamic Duo: OSINT and CTI for Proactive Defense against Cyber Threats.

Intro

In the relentless battle against cyber threats, organizations must adopt (and are already adopting) proactive defense strategies against cyber threats to protect their environment. Two powerful weapons in this battle are Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Cyber Threat intelligence (CTI).

Since the world of cybersecurity is constantly evolving, new cyber threats are emerging every day. Whenever we combine two so-called weapons, they create a dynamic duo that helps organizations stay on the same level or even one step ahead of cyber threats.

OSINT & CTI

OSINT and CTI provide essential methodologies for gathering intelligence and analyzing information from multiple sources. By gathering publicly available data, both from open sources and curated external feeds, organizations can gain valuable insights into potential risks or vulnerabilities. This information allows us to proactively identify emergent threats, track cyber threats, identify their tactics techniques and procedures (TTPs), indicators of attack, and IOCs, and fortify our defenses accordingly (IMHO, a person who’s working in CTI should have proficient — expert experience in OSINT).

We will try to dive into the world of OSINT and CTI and explore how the combination of these two powerful weapons enhances situational awareness, enables early threat detection, and strengthens defenses in our evolving cyber threat landscape (thanks to AI, which is being used by cyber threats).

Threat Landscape Overview.. Who’s breathing down your neck? Contextualized Analysis

One of the primary benefits of combining OSINT and CTI is enhanced situational awareness. OSINT provides a broad range of publicly accessible information from social media, news articles, public databases, forums, blogs, and more. Data allows CTI to monitor and have discussions about potential cyber threats, attack vectors, or vulnerabilities related to their industry or a specific app or program that they have and use on a daily basis.

For example:

News Article: CVE-2017–11882: Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Vulnerability. Company X has been breached by Threat Actor Group X.
As a CTI, you would look at: If Company X is in your industry, is that threat actor group targeting only that industry? Does that threat actor group attack other industries? Which geolocation are they targeting? What are their motives? Are they related to other groups? Did your company patch CVE-2017–11882? Is there anything that could potentially make our company “naked” to someone? Is there a PoC (proof of concept)? Could other TAs that target our organization exploit this and attack us? Are we BULLETPROOF? This is where OSINT comes to the rescue.

So, by integrating OSIN data with CTI feeds from trusted sources (threat intelligence platforms, security vendors, etc.), organizations could gain comprehensive visibility into their threat landscape and what is breathing in their necks.

Early Threat Detection

OSINT allows organizations to monitor publicly available information (and sometimes information that is not in the clear web) for indicators of compromise (IOCs), tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as indicators of attack being discussed by threat actors on forums and groups.

Correlating internal security events with external intelligence gathered through OSIN could quickly detect emerging threats before they escalate into full-blown attacks (which could cost a lot..). Proactive intelligence-driven defense enables organizations to take preemptive actions by implementing necessary countermeasures or applying relevant patches to protect systems (mentioned in the example above).

Proactive Defense Measures

OSINT and CTI helps proactively take defense measures by identifying vulnerabilities in real-time based on ongoing monitoring activities.

For example:

Company X is a multinational organization that is proactively monitoring open source channels through OSINT. They came across information in one forum about the potential possibility of exploiting Microsoft Word, with instructions on how to do that. You checked everywhere; there’s no patch available, but threat actors explained how to exploit it, so you gave that information to your Red Team, Blue Team, VM Team, etc. to check if there’s a possibility to exploit it in your environment and if there’s anything that you can do to protect against it. The Red Team exploited it and gave information on how to protect your system against this attack. A few weeks passed, and the Cyber Security Operation team noted that someone tried to exploit it, and your intelligence helped to defend against it.

Conclusion

The Best defense is a proactive one!