Introduction to MITRE’s ATT&CK™
Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) for enterprise is a framework which describes the adversarial actions or tactics from Initial Access (Exploit) to Command & Control (Maintain). ATT&CK™ Enterprise deals with the classification of post-compromise adversarial tactics and techniques against Windows™, Linux™ and MacOS™.
This community-enriched model adds techniques used to realize each tactic. These techniques are not exhaustive, and the community adds them as they are observed and verified.
To read more about how ATT&CK™ is helpful in resolving challenges and validate our defenses, please check this article.
Introduction to MITRE’s ATT&CK™ Navigator
ATT&CK™ Navigator is a tool openly available through GitHub which uses the STIX 2.0 content to provide a layered visualization of ATT&CK™ model.
ATT&CK™ Navigator stores information in JSON files and each JSON file is a layer containing multiple techniques which can be opened on Navigator web interface. The JSON contains content in STIX 2.0 format which can be fetched from a TAXII 2.0 server of your own choice. For example, we can fetch ATT&CK™ content from MITRE's TAXII 2.0 server through APIs.
The techniques in this visualization can be:
- Highlighted with color coding.
- Added with a numerical score to signal severity/frequency of the technique.
- Added with a comment to describe that occurrence of technique or any other meaningful information.
These layers can be exported in SVG and excel format.
How to View a JSON in ATT&CK™ Navigator?
- Open MITRE’s ATT&CK™ Navigator web application. (https://mitre-attack.github.io/attack-navigator/enterprise/).
- In Navigator, open a New Tab through clicking '+' button.
- Then click on 'Open Existing Layer' and then 'Upload from Local' which will let you choose a JSON file from your local machine (or, the one attached later in this blog).
- After uploading JSON file the layer will be opened in Navigator and will look like this:
This visualization highlights the techniques covered in the JSON file with color and comments.
RSA Netwitness Endpoint Application Rules
The Rule Library contains all the Endpoint Application Rules and we can map these rules or detection capabilities to the tactics/techniques of ATT&CK™ matrix. The mapping shows how many tactics/techniques are detected by RSA NetWitness Endpoint Application Rules.
We have created a layer as a JSON file which has all the NetWitness Endpoint Application Rules mapped to techniques. Then we have imported that layer on ATT&CK™ Navigator matrix to show the overlap. In the following image, we can see all the techniques highlighted that are detected by NetWitness Endpoint Application Rules:
The JSON for Endpoint Application Rules is attached with this blog and can be downloaded.
While hovering mouse over each colored technique you can see three things:
- Technique ID: Unique IDs of each technique as per ATT&CK™ framework.
- Score: Threat score given to each technique.
- Comment: We can write anything related in comment to put things in perspective. In this case, we have commented pipe (‘|’) delimited names of application rules which cover that technique.
To quantify how much RSA NetWitness Endpoint Application Rules spread across the matrix we can refer to the following plot:
We have already mapped RSA ESA Rules with ATT&CK™ framework as described in this article. We can update these ATT&CK™ coverage periodically which will help us to give us a consolidated picture of our complete defense system and thus we can quantify and monitor the evolution of our detection capabilities.
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