kth.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
APTer: Towards the Investigation of APT Attribution
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Computer Science, Network and Systems Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0479-6766
National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Show others and affiliations
2023 (English)In: Proceedings - 2023 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing, DSC 2023, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The rise of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) in recent years has sparked widespread concern in the cyber domain. APT-based cyberattacks are often stealthy, multistaged, slow-moving, low-profile, and time-consuming. Furthermore, these attacks consist of a series of steps, each employing a different technique variation. Consequently, most existing approaches are inadequate for analyzing the behavior of such attacks effectively. To prevent potential compromises, a proactive APT defense strategy that can identify potential APT stages and attribute them to a specific APT group is required. Therefore, for both public and private organizations, the correlation and attribution of these attacks are crucial. In this paper, we propose APTer, a preliminary effort towards the archetype of APT attribution. The first aim of the research is to correlate multiple stages of APTs based on threat alerts. To define and correlate the APT stages, APTer first eliminates redundant threat alerts and clusters the remaining ones. Second, APTer uses a novel APT stage prediction mechanism to forecast future APT phases. We have developed a prediction model to determine the next APT stages. Finally, APTer attributes the identified and predicted stages to a particular APT group. APT attribution aims to find MITRE ATTCK Tools, Tactics, and Procedures (TTPs) that indicate possible threats by a specific group correlated with the MITRE ATTCK knowledge base. Additionally, we perform mapping of Common Vulnerability Exploits (CVEs) to MITRE ATTCK to provide additional knowledge about existing vulnerabilities that can be mapped to the MITRE ATTCK technique. We have evaluated our work on real-world datasets from Third Party. Our results show that APTer can correlate, predict, attribute, and map with high accuracy of 97.3% and low false-positive rates of 2.1%.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2023.
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-342652DOI: 10.1109/DSC61021.2023.10354155Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85182271950OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-342652DiVA, id: diva2:1831246
Conference
6th IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing, DSC 2023, Tampa, United States of America, Nov 7 2023 - Nov 9 2023
Note

Part of ISBN 9798350382112

QC 20240125

Available from: 2024-01-25 Created: 2024-01-25 Last updated: 2024-07-01Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Publisher's full textScopus

Authority records

Patil, Rajendra

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Patil, Rajendra
By organisation
Network and Systems Engineering
Computer Sciences

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 211 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf