Threat Intelligence feeds are now being touted as the saving grace for SIEM and log management deployments, and as a way to supercharge incident detection and even response practices. We have heard similar promises before as an industry, so it is only fair to try to investigate. Since the actual number of breaches and attacks worldwide is unknown, it is impossible to measure how good threat intelligence feeds really are, right? Enter a new scientific breakthrough developed over the last 300 years: statistics!
This presentation will consist of a data-driven analysis of a cross-section of threat intelligence feeds (both open-source and commercial) to measure their statistical bias, overlap, and representability of the unknown population of breaches worldwide. Are they a statistical good measure of the population of "bad stuff" happening out there? Is there even such a thing? How tuned to your specific threat surface are those feeds anyway? Regardless, can we actually make good use of them even if the threats they describe have no overlap with the actual incidents you have been seeing in your environment?
We will provide an open-source tool for attendees to extract, normalize and export data from threat intelligence feeds to use in their internal projects and systems. It will be pre-configured with current OSINT network feed and easily extensible for private or commercial feeds. All the statistical code written and research data used (from the open-source feeds) will be made available in the spirit of reproducible research. The tool itself will be able to be used by attendees to perform the same type of tests on their own data.
Join Alex and Kyle on a journey through the actual real-world usability of threat intelligence to find out which mix of open source and private feeds are right for your organization.
Alex Pinto is the Chief Data Scientist of MLSec Project. The goal of the project is to provide a platform for hypothesis testing for people interested in the development of machine learning algorithms to support the information security monitoring practice. He has over 14 years dedicated to information security solutions architecture, strategic advisory and monitoring. He has experience with a great range of security products, and has managed SOCs and SIEM implementations for way too long. Alex currently currently holds the CISSP-ISSAP, CISA, CISM and PMP certifications, not that anyone cares. He was also a PCI QSA for almost 7 years, but is almost fully recovered. Twitter: @alexcpsec
Kyle Maxwell is a private-sector threat intelligence analyst and malware researcher working with incident response and security operations. He is a GPL zealot, believes in UNIX uber alles, and supports his local CryptoParty. Kyle holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Dallas. Twitter: @kylemaxwell