Today’s threat actors are more advanced and well-funded than ever before, obfuscating their activities and identities to remain virtually anonymous. We are, however, able to use personal data attributes – IP addresses, crypto wallets, usernames and passwords, and similar identifiers – to track the breadcrumb trails between the point of compromise and the threat actor in the wake of an attack. Investigators can leverage breached data to piece together a bad actor’s digital footprint and track them down.
With hundreds, if not thousands, of cybersecurity companies offering a wide variety of services, you would think we would be equipped to prevent nearly all cyber-attacks – or at the very least reduce the vast amount of financial and reputational damage that occurs each year. The technology that exists is far more sophisticated now than it was just five years ago, and it continues to evolve to keep pace with persistent cybercriminals. The problem is that the biggest cyber threat to an organization is its own people: human error. Your organization could leverage the best cyber solutions on the market, but poor cyber hygiene still runs rampant despite the industry’s repeated attempts to warn against password reuse, phishing attacks, and poorly configured or unprotected servers.
To mitigate crises, enterprises can implement draconian measures – restricting access to social networking sites, whitelisting certain apps – or take an Orwellian route to the entire infrastructure and monitor the actions of every employee within its network. However, both approaches have major drawbacks. Instead of focusing on what is happening within an organization, it is time for organizations to anticipate and defeat external threats, which can be accomplished with identity attribution.
Enterprises would be wise to monitor open sources on the surface, social, deep and dark web for exposed identity information, which can help security teams understand employee and executive digital footprints, as well as aid in developing an understanding of an enterprise’s adversaries. Attribution for disruption is beneficial to individuals and organizations on the frontlines of cyberwar – intelligence analysts, threat hunters, criminal investigators, financial and healthcare organizations, government and other public agencies, and many more.
At Constella Intelligence, we have designed a powerful platform, Hunter, to improve the fraud investigation process to make it easier and quicker for investigators to identify malicious activity and attribute that activity to real-world identities. With Hunter, investigators are able to analyze data from multiple sources in one location, collate and compare across sources and identify connections and networks of activity.
Understanding there is a real person behind the attack, security operation leaders must adapt and take a more proactive approach. By unmasking cybercriminals attacking your organization, you can take action to know your adversary and disrupt future attacks. Learn more about Hunter to see how it helps users efficiently attribute identities and identify further intelligence across multiple data sources simultaneously to expose the true identity of threat actors.
