The MITRE ATT&CK framework helps organizations map out attack lifecycles, organizing and classifying techniques to provide insight to security teams. SecOps teams use the framework to identify indicators of known attack patterns and identify potential gaps in cybersecurity.
The true value, however, is in operationalizing MITRE ATT&CK results to improve your cybersecurity posture over use and time.
Relevance of MITRE ATT&CK Results
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is updated biannually to include new TTPs. Testing solutions can help by telling you how your organization performs against known and evolving ATT&CK techniques, so you can take proactive action to mitigate threats.
Using the MITRE ATT&CK framework, paired with a breach and attack simulation (BAS) tool, enables comprehensive testing against adversarial threats. This pairing gives organizations a way to stimulate their controls to understand what controls are working and which ones may need to be improved. This can be applied across the whole security program to understand what threats are being missed and more importantly, why they are missed.
Designing a Prioritization Strategy
The Center for Threat Informed Defense has a calculator you can use to generate the Top 10 techniques across each category, but you will have to manually examine each threat and compare it to your “expected“ results to determine which ones are most important to prioritize. At best, this list helps you see the most dangerous threats, but not which ones actually pose the greatest risk to your environment given current controls. Overall, this approach still relies on opinions about performance, rather than actual performance measurements across people, processes, and tech.
SightGain tests against threats, measures performance, and analyzes your performance to create a prioritized list of recommendations based on critical factors, such as:
- Performance gaps against most prevalent threat techniques
- Organizational risk posture
- Financial exposure
- Data loss and downtime potential
- And more
You get priority threat rankings along with remediation and improvement roadmaps, so you can easily see which areas of your cybersecurity you need to improve first and why they are the highest priority.
Operationalizing MITRE ATT&CK Results with SightGain
Enterprise vulnerability programs framework often find long lists of security gaps, but 99% of vulnerabilities never turn into exploits. This is where MITRE ATT&CK can bring real value, but where do you start and how do you prioritize threats? SightGain provides you with the insights you need to focus your efforts on the most pressing security threats. You can see how you’re performing against the most prevalent threats across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, prioritize your efforts using MITRE Mitigate recommendations, and implement specific actions you can take to improve results.
This is crucial.
SightGain operationalizes results through automated assessment processes and workflows for continuous improvement across people, processes, analytics, automation, and technology. By testing against actual threats and measuring results, SightGain can analyze the holistic performance of an organization’s security program. Results are mapped against the MITRE ATT&CK framework to allow customers to understand the context behind the threat and apply specific insights to their environment. Not only can they automate tests and results against the MITRE ATT&CK framework, but the results are also mapped to leading compliance frameworks including NIST 800-53, CMMC, NIST 800-171, FFIEC, Zero Trust, and ISO.
Besides surfacing potential security gaps, SightGain tests people, processes, and technology against real-world threats to provide a comprehensive view of what’s working and what’s not across the entirety of the security program.
With SightGain, you can:
- Continuously validate SecOps and measure performance across security tech, processes, automation, analytics, and personnel.
- Get prioritized, actionable recommendations to close performance gaps based on actual performance against threats from across the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
- Utilize threat intelligence feeds to stay ahead of emerging threats.
- Understand which investments are reducing risk and which are wasting money.
- Train SOC analysts on how to recognize and respond to threat techniques
- Automate compliance monitoring and reporting.
Continuous threat exposure management is key to staying on top of emerging threats. SightGain approaches continuous exposure management by connecting to your tools to provide deep visibility into SecOps across your technology, processes, analytics, automation, and personnel investments. SightGain builds on the data that l breach and attack simulation platforms provide. With the SightGain Threat Exposure Management Platform, you get verifiable insights and the recommendations you need to measure, monitor, and improve the performance of security teams, processes, analytics, and technology.
You can also use SightGain to validate security provider performance. Security service providers show you what threats they are catching and blocking, but you don’t know what threats they are missing. This is a hidden, but significant issue for most organizations. SightGain evaluates security service providers against MITRE ATT&CK techniques to show you what they might be missing, so customers can take steps to better protect themselves.
Leveraging MITRE ATT&CK Results for Effective Prioritization
The challenge with MITRE ATT&CK analysis is not the information it provides regarding actual cybersecurity threats. It’s with operationalizing the insights to improve your security posture. For that, you need an automated assessment solution like SightGain that provides continuous exposure management, prioritizes threats for remediation, and generates actionable recommendations to improve the overall performance of SOC personnel, people, processes, and technology.
Are you an MDR, MSP, MSSP, or organization looking to validate your compliance, evaluate performance against the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and leverage the results for robust threat mitigation? Reach out to schedule a demo today.
