Adversary Centric Intelligence

Adversary-Centric Intelligence is a proactive and targeted approach to cybersecurity that focuses on the human attacker—the "who, why, and how" behind a cyber threat—rather than just the technical artifacts of an attack.

This model shifts the defensive posture from being reactive (e.g., "block this bad IP address") to being predictive and strategic (e.g., "understand this specific threat group's goals and methods to anticipate their next move").

At its core, this intelligence model is built on creating detailed profiles of threat actors to understand them as human opponents with specific motivations, resources, and habits.

Core Components

An adversary-centric approach is defined by its deep focus on four key areas:

1. Threat Actor (The "Who"): This component involves identifying and profiling the specific individuals, groups (like an APT), or nation-states that pose a threat. This profile includes their name, known aliases, geographic location, language, and potential affiliations.

2. Motivations & Intent (The "Why"): This is the crucial strategic element. It seeks to understand why an adversary is attacking. Are they motivated by financial gain (like a ransomware group), espionage (a nation-state stealing secrets), hacktivism (political or social protest), or simply disruption? Understanding intent helps predict what an adversary will target.

3. Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) (The "How"): This is the behavioral blueprint of the adversary. Instead of just looking at a single piece of malware, this approach analyzes their entire operational playbook.

   • Tactics: The high-level objective, such as "Initial Access," "Credential Access," or "Exfiltration."

   • Techniques: The specific method used to achieve a tactic. For example, for "Initial Access," a method might be "Phishing."

   • Procedures: The exact, step-by-step implementation of a technique, such as the specific email template, a particular malware dropper, and the command-and-control (C2) domains they prefer to use.

4. Capabilities & Infrastructure (The "What"): This catalogs the tools and resources the adversary uses. It includes the specific malware families they develop or buy, the exploit kits they favor, the types of domains they register for C2, and the cloud providers they use to host their infrastructure.

How It's Used in Practice

Adversary-centric intelligence provides actionable context that allows security teams to make more effective decisions.

Proactive Threat Hunting

Instead of waiting for an alert, security teams can hunt for adversary behaviors. For example, suppose intelligence shows a specific APT group targeting your industry always uses a certain PowerShell command to move laterally. In that case, your team can proactively search your network logs for that specific command string. This allows you to find the attacker before they complete their mission.

Prioritized Vulnerability Management

A vulnerability scanner might find hundreds of "critical" vulnerabilities. An adversary-centric approach provides the context to prioritize them. Suppose intelligence shows that attackers are not actively exploiting a specific vulnerability but are heavily exploiting a "medium" one. In that case, the security team can prioritize patching the medium-risk vulnerability first because it represents a more apparent and present danger.

Enriched Incident Response

When an alert does fire, this intelligence provides immediate, critical context.

• Without it: An analyst sees an alert for a malicious file. They begin a long investigation from scratch.

• With it: The analyst sees the alert and the intelligence platform immediately identifies the file as a tool exclusively used by "APT-X." The analyst instantly knows the attacker's likely motivation (espionage), their other TTPs (what they'll do next), and what assets they are probably targeting (e.g., research data, executive emails). This drastically shortens the investigation and containment time.

Strategic Defense & Tailored Security

By understanding who is most likely to attack you and how, you can tailor your security controls. If your primary threat is a ransomware group that relies on phishing, you can invest more heavily in email security and user training. If your primary threat is a sophisticated nation-state actor, you might invest more in advanced endpoint detection and network decoys.

ThreatNG is designed to directly support an adversary-centric intelligence program by providing a continuous, "outside-in" view of an organization that mimics the reconnaissance and planning stages of an attacker. It helps security teams shift from a reactive posture to a predictive one by focusing on the "how" and "where" an adversary would strike.

Here is a detailed breakdown of how ThreatNG's capabilities facilitate adversary-centric intelligence.

External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring: Mapping the Adversary's Battlefield

An adversary-centric approach begins with understanding what the adversary sees. ThreatNG provides this foundational intelligence.

• External Discovery: The platform performs unauthenticated, external discovery without needing any connectors. This is precisely how a real-world adversary starts their attack—by scanning the public internet to build a map of your assets.

• Continuous Monitoring: Adversaries are constantly scanning, and an organization's attack surface changes daily. ThreatNG's continuous monitoring ensures that the "battlefield map" is always current, allowing teams to see new weaknesses as soon as an adversary would.

External Assessment: Modeling the "How" (Adversary TTPs)

This is where ThreatNG most directly models adversary behavior by assessing how an attacker would exploit the discovered assets. The platform's susceptibility scores are a direct measure of an organization's vulnerability to specific adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

• Explicit Adversary Mapping: The platform includes an External Adversary View that maps its findings to how an attacker might achieve initial access or persistence. It further operationalizes this by automatically translating technical findings (like leaked credentials) into the strategic language of adversary behavior using MITRE ATT&CK Mapping.

Detailed Assessment Examples:

• TTP: Phishing & Credential Theft: An adversary's goal is to steal credentials for initial access. ThreatNG assesses BEC & Phishing Susceptibility. It models this TTP by combining intelligence on:

  • Domain Name Permutations: Finding domains an adversary could create for spoofing.

  • Email Intelligence: Predicting email formats to target specific users.

  • Compromised Credentials: Identifying existing leaked credentials from the dark web that an adversary could use in a spear-phishing campaign.

• TTP: Exploiting Public-Facing Applications: An adversary will scan for known vulnerabilities to exploit. ThreatNG assesses Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility by looking for the same indicators, including:

  • Exposed Sensitive Ports, such as RDP, SSH, or industrial control system (ICS) ports.

  • Known Vulnerabilities on external-facing assets.

  • Ransomware Events: Tracking active ransomware gang activity related to the organization.

• TTP: Infrastructure Takeover: A common adversary technique is to hijack part of an organization's trusted infrastructure. ThreatNG assesses Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility. It mimics an adversary by analyzing:

  • DNS Records: Looking for dangling CNAME records.

  • SSL Certificate Statuses: Identifying misconfigurations that an attacker could exploit to take control of a subdomain.

Intelligence Repositories: Profiling the "Who" and "What"

Adversary-centric intelligence requires deep knowledge of the adversaries themselves (the "who") and their tools (the "what"). ThreatNG's "DarCache" repositories provide this critical context.

• Profiling the "Who": The DarCache Ransomware repository provides intelligence on specific threat actors, tracking over 70 ransomware gangs. This allows security teams to focus their defenses on the TTPs used by the particular groups known to target their industry.

• Profiling the "What" (Their Toolkit): The DarCache Vulnerability repository is a prime example of ACI. It doesn't just list vulnerabilities; it prioritizes them based on adversary use:

  • KEV (DarCache KEV): Identifies vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited in the wild, providing a direct, proven threat from adversaries.

  • EPSS (DarCache EPSS): Provides a score on the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited, helping teams predict an adversary's next move.

  • Verified Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Exploits (DarCache eXploit): Links directly to PoC exploit code on platforms like GitHub. This shows precisely how an adversary would weaponize a vulnerability.

Investigation Modules: Enabling Proactive Threat Hunting

These modules allow security teams to act like an adversary and proactively hunt for weaknesses using the intelligence they've gathered.

Detailed Investigation Examples:

• Adversary TTP: Infrastructure Reconnaissance: An adversary will map out an organization's entire technology stack to find the weakest link. An analyst can use the Domain Intelligence module to do the same.

  • Example: Using DNS Intelligence, an analyst can perform Vendor and Technology Identification to find all assets running a specific, vulnerable version of software (e.g., "Palo Alto Networks" or "Microsoft Entra" ). This mimics an adversary searching for a particular target.

• Adversary TTP: Data Exfiltration & Credential Harvesting: An adversary will hunt for "easy wins" like exposed secrets. An analyst can use the Sensitive Code Exposure module to find these first.

  • Example: An analyst can proactively search public code repositories for their organization's assets and discover AWS Access Key IDs, Private SSH keys, Database Files, or Environment configuration files before an adversary does.

• Adversary TTP: Phishing Campaign Preparation: An adversary will register domains that look like the target's. An analyst can use the Domain Name Permutations module to get ahead of this.

  • Example: The analyst can search for homoglyph attacks or Targeted Key Words (like "login," "pay," or "portal" ) to discover and potentially sinkhole malicious domains before they are used in an attack.

Reporting: Disseminating Actionable Intelligence

Adversary-centric intelligence is only practical if all stakeholders can understand it. ThreatNG's reporting translates complex external risks into actionable formats, such as Executive, Technical, and Prioritized reports. The embedded Knowledgebase makes this intelligence adversary-centric by providing not just a finding, but also the Reasoning (the "why" it's a risk) and Recommendations (the "what to do about it").

Complementary Solutions: Extending ACI Internally

ThreatNG's external, adversary-centric intelligence provides the crucial "why" and "what" to help prioritize the actions of internal security tools.

• Example 1: SIEM & SOAR: When ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring detects a newly exposed sensitive port (like RDP ) or a Subdomain Takeover vulnerability, this high-context, adversary-focused alert can be sent to a SOAR platform to trigger a high-priority automation playbook, such as initiating an internal vulnerability scan and creating a firewall change request.

• Example 2: Identity & Access Management (IAM): When the DarCache Rupture repository finds a new Compromised Credential for an executive, that intelligence can be fed via API to an IAM platform (like Microsoft Entra or Okta ). This can trigger an automatic password reset and elevate the user's risk score, operationalizing adversary intelligence to prevent an account takeover.

• Example 3: Internal Vulnerability Management: An internal scanner (like Tenable or Qualys ) may find thousands of "critical" vulnerabilities. ThreatNG's DarCache KEV and EPSS data provides the external adversary context. This allows the VM team to prioritize the 10 vulnerabilities that adversaries are actually exploiting in the wild over the 1,000 that are only theoretically critical.