Cyberattacks are on the rise and are likely to increase significantly throughout 2024.
Given this reality, it’s more important than ever that companies understand how to mitigate these threats.
TTPs are one method of studying how hackers get into networks. In the following sections, we provide some basic insight into TTPs and how understanding them can be used to help protect your company.
Check out some of our other resources to learn about how you can improve cybersecurity in 2024.
What Are TTPs?
TTP is an acronym that stands for tactics, techniques and procedures.
Defining TTPs in Cybersecurity
Tactics involve the ‘why’ of an action taken by hackers.
Techniques are the methods used to breach a network, usually a combination of hacking and social engineering.
Procedures are the steps taken either before or during an attack.
In the following sections, we’ll cover these in more detail to explore how companies can protect themselves from hostile actions.
Tactics in Cybersecurity
While monetary theft and scams remain common reasons for attacks, there are numerous other potential goals involved, depending on the actor. These include:
- Theft of technical data or intellectual property
- Theft of privileged organizational information
- Theft of blockchain or cryptocurrency assets
- State or corporate espionage
Companies operating in advanced industries are more likely to experience attempts at theft of R&D.
Crypto exchanges have been prime targets, partly because they often carry large consumer accounts. However, they are seldom caught up to the sophistication of cybersecurity defense found in major banks and tend to operate in more ambiguous regulatory environments.
Techniques in Cyber Attacks
In this section, we summarize some of the common techniques used in cyber attacks.
Phishing – Emails with false identities that attempt to acquire information to enter into systems or to satisfy fake invoices.
Spoofing – This also involves false identity, but is when scammers present a fake caller ID to give a false impression of legitimacy.
Identity-Based Attacks – An attacker assumes the identity of another individual after gathering their personal information and posing as them online. This can be for the purpose of theft and often targets individuals to exploit their personal assets. However, identity-based attacks can be used against a company if the identity of someone with privileged access is stolen.
Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks – Attempts to overwhelm a website or service to shut it down. Volume-based attacks can oversaturate a website’s bandwidth, whereas protocol attacks consume excessive server resources. Meanwhile, application layer attacks may crash a server by overwhelming it with requests.
Malware – Software designed to take control of a system, damage it or expose it to further vulnerability. Malware is often introduced using the trojan method as a link or download that appears benign but contains hostile software.
Code Injection Attacks – Code may be injected into an application to bypass authentication control, compromise the integrity of data or steal data. Common types of code injection attacks include Script Injection, Shell Injection, SQL Injection and Dynamic Injection.
Insider Threats – Insider Threats occur when a current or former employee poses a deliberate risk to the system.
Supply Chain Attacks – These entail cyber attacks on companies with shared data platforms, allowing hackers to jump from one to another. Preventing these requires tight security across the board for highly integrated systems.
DNS Tunneling – This involves making DNS requests to a server, which can allow hackers to take control and steal data.
IoT-Based Attacks – The spread of low-security IoT devices has made systems more vulnerable to these points of entry. Companies should take this into account whenever integrating new devices.
Procedures
Procedures are the sets of steps taken by hackers to compromise a network. This varies widely based on the type of attack, skillset and technique. This often entails some semblance of the following steps:
Research – Attackers gain general information about the target’s network and host. This may involve developing assets inside the target company or doing research on their own.
Scanning – At this stage, the goal is to gain more technical information, which may include network mapping, vulnerability scanning and port scanning.
Access – The third stage involves getting access using any of the methods discussed in the section above or additional ones. This may be through technological means, social engineering or a combination of the two. Hackers may attempt to maintain access for extended periods of time.
Concealing Origination – The final stage when exiting the network is to hide the identity of the attackers, often to avoid legal repercussions. In other cases, the attackers may leave false traces of another actor in order to direct attention that way and frame another party.
In the following section, we look into some of the basics when it comes to detecting cybersecurity attacks and protecting your network.
How to Address Cybersecurity Challenges
Cybersecurity planning often involves considerations for processes, monitoring and protection.
Processes involve protocols that govern internal access to privileged data, vetting individuals and assigning roles in the access hierarchy. These also govern onboarding and training to avoid mistaken participation in hostile attempts at human engineering.
Tools are often preferable for monitoring networks, allowing a company to monitor and record all behavior within a network. It can seek and grade the risk of individual actors and overall teams. This technology can also flag and alert suspicious behavior while recording key information about any suspicious actors that could help identify them. A variety of software solutions are available on the market in this regard.
Monitoring can considerably limit the damage of a security breach, but the preferable option is to avoid having as few vulnerabilities as possible to prevent breaches in the first place. Companies use a variety of vulnerability assessment tools, white-hat security breach attempts and careful vetting to ensure that any new deployments do not create gaps in endpoints that attackers could exploit.
There are numerous other complexities that need to be addressed when implementing cybersecurity at an organization.
Feel free to reach out to us for more information about how to protect your company in 2024.
