TTPXHunter: Actionable Threat Intelligence Extraction as TTPs from Finished Cyber Threat Reports

TL;DR

TTPXHunter is a novel NLP-based system that automatically extracts structured Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) from cyber threat reports, significantly improving threat intelligence analysis accuracy and speed.

Contribution

It introduces a new methodology leveraging domain-specific NLP and data augmentation to enhance TTP extraction from unstructured threat reports, outperforming existing solutions.

Findings

Achieved 92.42% F1-score on augmented dataset

Achieved 97.09% F1-score on real-world report dataset

Created large-scale datasets for TTP extraction evaluation

Abstract

Understanding the modus operandi of adversaries aids organizations in employing efficient defensive strategies and sharing intelligence in the community. This knowledge is often present in unstructured natural language text within threat analysis reports. A translation tool is needed to interpret the modus operandi explained in the sentences of the threat report and translate it into a structured format. This research introduces a methodology named TTPXHunter for the automated extraction of threat intelligence in terms of Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) from finished cyber threat reports. It leverages cyber domain-specific state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) to augment sentences for minority class TTPs and refine pinpointing the TTPs in threat analysis reports significantly. The knowledge of threat intelligence in terms of TTPs is essential for comprehensively understanding cyber threats and enhancing detection and mitigation strategies. We create two datasets: an augmented sentence-TTP dataset of 39,296 samples and a 149 real-world cyber threat intelligence report-to-TTP dataset. Further, we evaluate TTPXHunter on the augmented sentence dataset and the cyber threat reports. The TTPXHunter achieves the highest performance of 92.42% f1-score on the augmented dataset, and it also outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions in TTP extraction by achieving an f1-score of 97.09% when evaluated over the report dataset. TTPXHunter significantly improves cybersecurity threat intelligence by offering quick, actionable insights into attacker behaviors. This advancement automates threat intelligence analysis, providing a crucial tool for cybersecurity professionals fighting cyber threats.