“Who’s responsible for this?”
If you’ve heard this question from executive leadership in the wake of a cyber incident, you are not alone. Leadership wants to know who hacked the organization and how. But giving them answers isn’t a simple exercise in comparing a few dashboard entries and coming up with a name. It requires a systematic intelligence methodology.
In the search for cyber adversaries, security teams frequently confuse two distinct concepts: profiling and attribution. Not only do they struggle to properly identify who is targeting them, but misaligned defenses and flawed incident responses make the struggle worse.
Threat Actor Attribution vs. Profiling
Threat actor attribution and its profiling counterpart are related. Yet they are still separate and distinct concepts. Comparing the two side-by-side begins to clear things up.
For starters, attribution is a specialized, outcome-based subset of threat actor profiling. Consider the following:
- Threat Actor Profiling – Profiling is the process of building a comprehensive behavioral portrait of a cyber adversary. It involves cataloging TTPs along with an adversary’s preferred target industries, financial motivations, operational schedules, and language indicators. Profiling paints a very broad picture of how and why an adversary operates.
- Threat Actor Attribution – Attribution is more concise. Think of it as a precise, evidence-based decision to link a specific set of malicious behaviors to a known, real-world entity. That entity could be an individual hacker, a criminal or crime syndicate, or even a government intelligence agency.
DarkOwl, an industry leader in threat actor profiling and attribution, explains it this way: profiling tells a security team the kind of adversary they are dealing with based on linked behaviors. Attribution connects those behaviors to specific, commonly named entities.
More About Threat Actor Attribution
What security teams often fail to understand about threat actor attribution is that it is not a simple, one-step process. It’s a multilayered intelligence process that relies heavily on correlating technical indicators with human and contextual intelligence. Proper attribution utilizes:
- Technical Analysis – Security analysts examine hard, technical indicators from each intrusion. They look at command-and-control setups, SSL certificate signatures, malware code, timestamps, and more.
- TTP Matching – Analysts map observed TTPs using standardized threat frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK. The purpose is to identify distinct operational footprints that track back to known individuals or groups.
- Intelligence Fusion – Security teams have access to both open-source intelligence (OSINT) and external cyber threat intelligence (CTI). Proper threat actor attribution requires fusing the two by cross-referencing internal intelligence with external data from a variety of public and proprietary sources.
- Confidence Assessment – When the analysis is complete and security experts are ready to establish a link, they assign a level of confidence to the attribution based on the strength, uniqueness, and consistency of their evidence. Confidence levels are typically Low, Medium, and High.
Attribution and confidence tend to correlate to the intelligence data analysts are working with. High-quality intelligence generates better results. From the analyst’s standpoint, intelligence quality is more important than quantity.
Why Every Security Team Should Be Doing It
Unfortunately, smaller security teams often assume that threat actor attribution is only something defense contractors and government agencies do. They fail to realize that integrating attribution into their daily operations could help them:
- Anticipate an adversary’s next move.
- Prioritize defensive resources and strategies.
- Streamline incident response.
Most importantly, for the purposes of this post, effective threat actor attribution makes it possible to answer that nagging question from leadership: who is responsible? By linking the characteristics of past incidents to the patterns and behaviors of known adversaries, security analysts can figure out who is attacking them – and why and how they are doing it.
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