Using MITRE PRE-ATT&CK and ATT&CK In Cybercrime Education and Research - October 2020

Aunshul Rege, Associate Professor, Temple University, @prof_rege

Rachel Bleiman, PhD Student/NSF Graduate Research Assistant, Temple University, @rab1928

This presentation from the MITRE ATT&CKcon Power Hour session on October 9, 2020, explores the application of the MITRE ATT&CK® and PRE-ATT&CK matrices in cybercrime education and research. Specifically, Rege and Bleiman demonstrate the mapping of the PRE-ATT&CK matrix to social engineering case studies as an experiential learning project in an upper-level cybercrime liberal arts course. It thus allows students to understand the alignment process of threat intelligence to the PRE-ATT&CK framework and also learn about its usefulness/limitations. The talk also discusses the mapping of the ATT&CK matrix, tactics, techniques, software, and groups for two cybercrime datasets created by collating publicly disclosed incidents: (i) critical infrastructure ransomware (CIRW) incidents, and (ii) social engineering (SE) incidents. For the CIRW dataset, 39% of the strains mapped onto the ATT&CK software. For the SE dataset, 49% of the groups and 65% of the techniques map on to the MITRE framework. This helps the researchers identify the framework's usefulness/limitations and also helps our datasets connect to richer information that may not otherwise be available in the publicly disclosed incidents.