Mining Attributed Graphs for Threat Intelligence

Understanding and fending off attack campaigns against organizations, companies and individuals, has become a global struggle. As today's threat actors become more determined and organized, isolated efforts to detect and reveal threats are no longer effective. Although challenging, this situation can be significantly changed if information about security incidents is collected, shared and analyzed across organizations. To this end, different exchange data formats such as STIX, CyBOX, or IODEF have been recently proposed and numerous CERTs are adopting these threat intelligence standards to share tactical and technical threat insights. However, managing, analyzing and correlating the vast amount of data available from different sources to identify relevant attack patterns still remains an open problem. In this paper we present MANTIS, a platform for threat intelligence that enables the unified analysis of different standards and the correlation of threat data trough a novel type-agnostic similarity algorithm based on attributed graphs. Its unified representation allows the security analyst to discover similar and related threats by linking patterns shared between seemingly unrelated attack campaigns through queries of different complexity. We evaluate the performance of MANTIS as an information retrieval system for threat intelligence in different experiments. In an evaluation with over 14,000 CyBOX objects, the platform enables retrieving relevant threat reports with a mean average precision of 80%, given only a single object from an incident, such as a file or an HTTP request. We further illustrate the performance of this analysis in two case studies with the attack campaigns Stuxnet and Regin.