Paper Information
- Author
- Elijah Pelofske;Lorie M. Liebrock;Vincent Urias
- Published
- 1-28-2023
- Updated
- 10-8-2024
- Affiliation
- New Mexico Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, New Mexico Tech
- Country
- United States of America
- Conference
- Computing Research Repository (CoRR)
Abstract
Open source intelligence is a powerful tool for cybersecurity analysts to
gather information both for analysis of discovered vulnerabilities and for
detecting novel cybersecurity threats and exploits. However the scale of
information that is relevant for information security on the internet is always
increasing, and is intractable for analysts to parse comprehensively. Therefore
methods of condensing the available open source intelligence, and automatically
developing connections between disparate sources of information, is incredibly
valuable. In this research, we present a system which constructs a Neo4j graph
database formed by shared connections between open source intelligence text
including blogs, cybersecurity bulletins, news sites, antivirus scans, social
media posts (e.g., Reddit and Twitter), and threat reports. These connections
are comprised of possible indicators of compromise (e.g., IP addresses,
domains, hashes, email addresses, phone numbers), information on known exploits
and techniques (e.g., CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK Technique ID's), and potential
sources of information on cybersecurity exploits such as twitter usernames. The
construction of the database of potential IoCs is detailed, including the
addition of machine learning and metadata which can be used for filtering of
the data for a specific domain (for example a specific natural language) when
needed. Examples of utilizing the graph database for querying connections
between known malicious IoCs and open source intelligence documents, including
threat reports, are shown. We show three specific examples of interesting
connections found in the graph database; the connections to a known exploited
CVE, a known malicious IP address, and a malware hash signature.