Threat intelligence plays a fundamental role in cybersecurity, transforming raw data into actionable insights that help protect organizations from cyberattacks. The difference between mere data and intelligence lies in the analysis and contextualization of this information, allowing for a deeper understanding of threats. In this context, understanding the profile of threat actors is essential for identifying behavior patterns and anticipating potential attacks.

Recently, Axur took a significant step forward by launching a new feature in Polaris: detailed profiles pages of threat actors. This new capability provides a deeper insight into threats, enabling organizations to strengthen their defenses more effectively.

Before we delve into this new feature, let’s recap some key concepts on this topic.

What is a Threat Actor?

A threat actor is any individual, group, or organization that engages in malicious activities aimed at compromising the digital security of a company, individual, or system. These actors can range from individual hackers to state-sponsored groups, each with different motivations and attack techniques. Notable examples include high-level criminal organizations like the ransomware group Lockbit3.0 or even Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) like Fancy Bear, whose attacks are state-sponsored, adding a layer of complexity to the analysis of these groups.

Different Profiles, Different Attacks

Threat actors can be classified into several categories based on their motivations and operational methods. Some key examples are:

• Hacktivists: Motivated by political or social causes, they use cyberattacks to promote their agendas.
  Cybercriminals: Seek financial gain through illegal activities such as fraud, data theft, and extortion.
  State-sponsored Groups: Conduct cyber espionage and sabotage on behalf of governments, aiming to gain strategic and political advantages.
  
  

While the term "threat actor" is used to classify a wide range of groups and malicious actors, in practice, each actor operates with a unique set of motivations, capabilities, and tools. Unifying these scattered data to better understand a threat actor's profile and capabilities is challenging – but for Axur, it’s not impossible.

Understand to Protect – A Practical Use Case

Based on their motivations and capabilities, certain behavior patterns can be expected from threat actors. Understanding the group's historical activity, tools, and capabilities allows for more decisive actions to mitigate cyber threats associated with these actors. When dealing with a specific threat, having organized and analyzed intelligence data on a group's activity profile is a powerful weapon for Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence teams, enabling both strategic incident response and preventive measures against these actors.

See how it works in practice:

Imagine your organization detects unusual activity suggesting the presence of ransomware on the network. Upon being presented with the incident evidence, a ransomware note, you discover that the malicious actor is affiliated with the threat actor Lockbit3.0. But what does this really say about the incident, the group's methods, and behavior?

Using Polaris, you can identify various consolidated and analyzed intelligence data by our platform. Polaris allows you to identify previously collected insights associated with the threat actor, such as recent incidents, techniques used, and recent intelligence reports. These data enable your team to identify essential aspects for your security posture during incident handling:

1. Attack Vectors: The threat actor profile provides data on attack vectors commonly used by the malicious actor, such as tools, post-exploitation techniques, and impact activities sought by the actor. This allows you to direct incident handling efforts to identify breaches and reinforce your security during a time when every minute is crucial.

2. Mitigations: Polaris collects and associates relevant information on Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) previously observed in relation to a malicious actor. These data can be used by EDR/XDR systems to attempt to mitigate the persistence of malicious actors in your network and identify behavior patterns.

3. Decision Support: Some incidents require decisions that are not strictly technical. Better understanding the security threat profile allows your organization to have more ready-to-use information for planning its actions, considering aspects such as history, motivation, and techniques of these actors.

How Polaris Helps You Monitor Different Threat Actors

Polaris, an Axur module that acts as a Threat Intelligence analyst, collects data 24/7 associated with security incidents and the activities of these threat actors (our Insights). Now, Polaris also allows organizing these data on a specific page, connecting insights to related malicious actors, producing a threat actor profile built on these data – and, therefore, constantly updated with the latest information.

In addition to relating different insights to threat actors, the threat actor profile page allows identifying analyses of these groups' activities, such as tools, vectors, history, among other data. Our strategy is to simplify the visualization and understanding of threats, strengthening your organization’s defense against potential attacks, all within a single platform.

See How Access to Threat Actor Profiles Simplifies Your Daily Work

The Threat Actor Profile feature is designed to bring strategic and quick advantages to your Cybersecurity and Threat Intel teams. We can summarize these benefits into three main points:

• Decision Support in Incident Response: Responding to security incidents is a complex task, where consolidated and actionable intelligence data can make all the difference in the decisions made. In many security incidents, it is possible to identify the name of the malicious actor, and Polaris will allow you to collect data on the faced threat in a simplified and easily accessible manner.
  
  
• Prevention and Mitigation of Emerging Risks: Besides incident response, organizations often protect their defenses preventively, identifying emerging threats to their IT infrastructures and taking appropriate measures to protect against specific threats. Polaris will allow, upon identifying emerging threats, an easy understanding of how and where to prepare your defenses to mitigate these risks.
  
  
• Support for Analyzing Relevant Incidents: By integrating insights data into building the threat actor profile, Polaris allows security teams to have easy access to information sources related to the historical activity of malicious actors and analyses generated by artificial intelligence.

Polaris: Your New Threat Intelligence Analyst

Centralizing and integrating information about threat actors is one of the new automated data collection and analysis capabilities of Polaris. With this evolution of our tool, we hope our partners will identify, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats more efficiently, protecting their digital assets and strengthening the company’s security posture.

Check out some examples:

• Lockbit
• Sandworm
• ALPHV/BlackCat

To see the top threat actors of the last month, access Polaris for free.