Cyber Threat Intelligence Mining for Proactive Cybersecurity Defense: A Survey and New Perspectives

Nan Sun, Ming Ding, Jiaojiao Jiang, Weikang Xu, Xiaoxing Mo, Yonghang Tai, Jun Zhang

Abstract: Today’s cyber attacks have become more severe and frequent, which calls for a new line of security defenses to protect against them. The dynamic nature of new-generation threats, which are evasive, resilient, and complex, makes traditional security systems based on heuristics and signatures struggle to match. Organizations aim to gather and share real-time cyber threat information and then turn it into threat intelligence for preventing attacks or, at the very least, responding quickly in a proactive manner. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) mining, which uncovers, processes, and analyzes valuable information about cyber threats, is booming. However, most organizations today mainly focus on basic use cases, such as integrating threat data feeds with existing network and firewall systems, intrusion prevention systems, and Security Information and Event Management systems (SIEMs), without taking advantage of the insights that such new intelligence can deliver. In order to make the most of CTI so as to significantly strengthen security postures, we present a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on CTI mining from multiple data sources in this article. Specifically, we provide and devise a taxonomy to summarize the studies on CTI mining based on the intended purposes (i.e., cybersecurity-related entities and events, cyber attack tactics, techniques and procedures, profiles of hackers, indicators of compromise, vulnerability exploits and malware implementation, and threat hunting), along with a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art. Lastly, we discuss research challenges and possible future research directions for CTI mining.