Every day thousands of people experience cybersecurity issues. And with time, these cybersecurity risks are increasing day by day. Ignoring these can lead to the most expensive mistake for your business. You cannot eliminate the risk but use defense techniques as a possible solution to lower the effects.
MITRE ATT&CK and Cyber kill chain are the two broad terms to address cyberattacks against an organisation. But there are specific points of difference between the two. Cyber Kill Chain with its seven phases, addresses the cyberattack process from a high level. But MITRE ATT&CK differs from tactics, where ATT&CK stands for Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge.
Let us take a quick tour of MITRE ATT&CK vs Cyber kill chain.
What is MITRE ATT&CK Framework in context to Cyber Kill Chain vs MITRE ATT&CK?
MITRE developed ATT&CK as a model to document and track various techniques attackers use throughout the different stages of cyberattacks to penetrate your network and exfiltrate data.
MITRE ATT&CK use Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures to adequately manage cybersecurity knowledge into a hierarchical framework. It is one of the most respected and referred resources in cybersecurity if we talk about MITRE ATT&CK vs Cyber Kill Chain. You can readily use the techniques ATT&CK follows from cybersecurity threats.
The Tactics of MITRE ATT&CK:
The tactic includes a list of 'techniques' aimed to accomplish that tactic. It elaborates technical objectives that the attackers are trying to achieve. Tactics are listed in a logical sequence. In terms of MITRE ATT&CK vs Cyber Kill Chain EDR, there are a lot of differences. Let us understand them.
Reconnaissance: It refers to assembling the information in preparation for an attack.
Resource Development: For an attack, creating, compromising, buying, and stealing resources.
Initial Access: It defines as acquiring access to the victim's systems.
Execution: It means executing malicious code on the compromised network or systems.
Persistence: Appropriately sustaining access to that system.
Privilege Escalation: Attempting to achieve higher-level concessions.
Defence Evasion: Avoid detection by taking action.
Credential Access: Attempting to gain access to accounts
Discovery: Gathering information
Lateral Movement: Moving from system to system
Collection: To support the high-level attack goal, gathering data.
Command and control: It refers to establishing authority over systems in the prey's network and communicating with compromised systems from outside the network.
Exfiltration: Stealing the prey's data
Impact: Destroying, damaging, or otherwise making networks, systems, and data unavailable to the victim.
What is Cyber Kill Chain Framework if we talk about Cyber Kill Chain vs MITRE ATT&CK?
The Cyber Kill Chain was released in 2011 by Lockheed Martin, which detects the stages of a cyber-attack. The term "Kill Chain" defines as the process of planning and launching attacks adopted from the traditional military concept.
The Cyber Kill Chain identifies vulnerabilities and helps security teams to halt the attacks at every stage of the chain. The Cyber Kill Chain is split into seven phases. Let's understand them.
Reconnaissance: It involves researching potential targets before carrying out any penetration testing. It is almost the exact when we talk about MITRE ATT&CK vs Cyber Kill Chain.
Weaponisation: Once the researchers have gathered all the information, they use the latter's weaknesses to exploit them.
Delivery: It includes delivering weaponized bundles to the victim via email, web, USB, etc.
Exploitation: In this, the malware begins executing on the target system.
Installation: The malware installs a backdoor or other ingress available to the aggressor.
Command and Control: At this stage, the infiltrator gains a constant pass to the victim's systems.
Actions on Objective: In this, the infiltrator commences end-goal actions, such as data theft, data destruction, or data corruption.
Cyber Kill Chain vs MITRE ATT&CK
If you talk about Cyber Kill Chain vs MITRE ATT&CK, there is a tiny difference. The fundamental difference between the two is that Cyber Kill Chain claims all cyberattacks must follow a specific sequence of attack tactics to achieve success-MITRE ATT&CK makes no such claim.
The Cyber Kill Chain consists of a series of elementary stages that constitute a cyberattack. It is considered a general defensive security axiom that breaks any phase of the kill chain that will stop an attacker from successfully achieving their goal.
But with the MITRE ATT&CK in comparison to MITRE ATT&CK vs Cyber Kill Chain, it is more than a sequence of attack tactics. It follows the hierarchy of tactics, techniques, procedures, and other common knowledge. It correlates with environment-specific cybersecurity information.
Which is better when it comes to Cyber Kill Chain vs MITRE ATT&CK?
Cybersecurity in everyone's system is vital, and when you experience any cyber attack, Cyber Kill Chain and MITRE ATT&CK are helpful. But if we talk about Cyber Kill Chain vs MITRE ATT&CK, the ATT&CK one is better.
Cyber Kill Chain does not provide deep insights into the attacker's procedures, limiting its usefulness.
A debate on the Cyber Kill Chain is whether its central axiom, preventing one stage of an attacker's process will disable the attack. The practical approach is applying resources according to contextual risk. It is an approach that tries to eliminate security breaches by prioritizing the early stages of an attack as inadequate. as inadequate.
MITRE ATT&CK represents a fuller library of malicious behaviour and provides a deeper library of actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence. ATT&CK entirely understands the methodologies and goals, justifying the inclusion of security controls and providing some degree of protection against all aspects of real-world cyberattacks.
With this, it's clear that MITRE ATT&CK is much more helpful to threat hunters and provides complete security to the system. Now, you are also aware of the difference between the MITRE ATT&CK vs Cyber Kill Chain.