Part of an effective cybersecurity posture is consistently honing excellent cyber threat intelligence skills. This means recognizing and remediating your organization’s potential vulnerabilities, ensuring adequate cybersecurity training is disseminated among your employees, and regularly changing your passwords are standard operating procedures.
But effective cyber threat intelligence also means lightly delving into a malicious actor's psyche to better understand their order of operations for executing an attack or breach of some kind. In other words, tracing their steps to see what they tried, what worked, and what might hinder them in the future.
Tactics, techniques, and procedures are also known as TTPs in the world of cybersecurity. In this article, we’ll dive into TTPs and why this is an essential aspect of SIEM strategy. Keep reading to learn more!
Let’s breakdown what each letter in this acronym stands for:
Tactics, sometimes referred to as Tools, are how your enterprise’s cybersecurity team can understand and track how a hacker might compromise your network, assets, etc. For example, a hacker might gain unauthorized access to a user’s account and move laterally within the network to find another vulnerability or access your organization via another form of entry. Whatever tactics—or tools—the hacker uses to infiltrate falls into this category.
The next T, which stands for techniques, entails how the attack, breach, threat, etc., was able to be carried out in your network or other assets. For example, social engineering might have been leveraged to physically access your building so the threat actor could leave a thumb drive loaded with malicious code on a desk somewhere.
Finally, this part of TTPs examines the series of steps that a malicious actor might have taken to carry out their attack. For instance, they might have scanned your company’s website for any vulnerabilities and then written a string of malicious code to exploit those vulnerabilities.
Tracing an attacker’s steps and motives towards targeting and exploiting your business is simply good forensics. Whether this process happens internally within your enterprise after suffering an attack or externally by closely following the TTPs of another enterprise’s breach, there is a lot that can be learned!
By taking the time to understand and recognize a malicious actor’s reasoning and order of operations, you and your team will be better equipped for the future, making TTPs an essential component of your cybersecurity strategy.
As threats evolve and threat actors continue to innovate in their methods, you and your team will develop a playbook for what motives and moves to anticipate going forward. Knowledge is power, and a proactive mindset will pay off in the long run.
Assembling an internal incident management team or SOC at your company can be expensive and time-consuming, especially if you’re unsure which cybersecurity solutions you need to prioritize and implement.
However, partnering with high-quality managed security services providers (MSSPs) like Compuquip means you get a comprehensive team and strategy customized to protect your enterprise.
With Compuquip, you and your organization will enjoy these benefits with our Managed SOC services:
We’ve got decades of experience, and our team of experts holds dozens of industry certifications. You can rest assured that we’re with you every step of the way, and we can’t wait to safeguard your enterprise against the latest wave of attacks.