[Dailydave] The Blue Pill of Threat Intelligence

[Zack]

Let me start with the statement that I have mad love for Dave.  While I loved the article Dave and mostly agree with you, I wanted to note a few things.  To be completely fair, your article was written by someone selling something that competes for budget dollars with av products and this email post is written by someone who consumes consumes data feeds from an array of 'sensors' whether those sensors are vuln reports written by offensive security teams, AV logs, or threat intelligence feeds from various groups (IRC channels of actors / private TAXI exchanges).  

In your article you state that threat intel is sold on a per host basis and requires an agent.  While this is true in some cases (I'm looking at you carbon black / bit9), I really see them more as an agent that sources indicators aggregated from private and public sources.  The point, dear reader, is don't misconstrue threat intel from products.  Threat intel is a data stream (though the feed itself can be a product) of information valuable to your Situational Awareness.  If some vendor wants to include the automata that acts on that data stream well that's another fucking product.

Ultimately, data relevant to your environment is valuable and as Dave hinted at, some of the best threat intelligence comes from your own data sources: DNS queries, process hashes, netflow data, authentication/authorization audit logs, proxy logs.  Those are all high value threat feeds because they 100% apply to you.  Threat intel coming from external parties can be valuable as well but is more noisy: how many of those 100,000,000 known C2 domains are you really gonna see on your network?

No data stream is gonna be complete and correlating multiple streams together based on what's available and valuable to your environment is key.   Personally I find that modeling your normal usage patterns and alerting based on anomaly to be less noisy but I also find value in lists of known bad domains / ip / whatever.

In the end, using these feeds to ply your SA impacts judgment (automated or manual) and everything else in your ecosystem is just a data stream you use to augment your perception.  I advocate mastering your least noisy streams first and try to see each intel feed / data stream as just another input.  The value of data streams coming from AV is rapidly diminishing if not already so noisy as to be useless.

I saw a talk in Vegas about measuring the IQ of your threat feeds and while the talk wasn't that groundbreaking it did leave some interesting food for thought: mainly diffing various intel feeds to get a fuzzy feeling of unique content.  Running through the mental exercise I realized that your internal data feeds are going to have a lot more unique content that is directly applicable to you meanwhile more than 99% of data from most external sources were never applicable.

Z

> On Oct 15, 2014, at 8:59 AM, Dave Aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:
> 
> http://www.fierceitsecurity.com/story/threat-intelligence-problem/2014-10-13
> 
> In this article I go over "Threat Intelligence". And I'm a little hard
> on it because I think it has to make a choice, and soon. In one hand, is
> a pill that takes it down the road to AV-like financial success, but
> strategic failure. And in the other hand, the current models are only
> stepping stones towards offerings that provide true strategic
> situational awareness to their clients, so their clients can build
> customized incident response programs that really work.
> 
> Honestly, I think because of the way VC-funded firms work, we may end up
> taking the blue pill, which is unfortunately for companies, but good for
> those of us doing offense.
> 
> -dave
> 
> 
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