AttacKG: Constructing Technique Knowledge Graph from Cyber Threat Intelligence Reports

Abstract

Cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and diverse, making attack detection increasingly challenging. To combat these attacks, security practitioners actively summarize and exchange their knowledge about attacks across organizations in the form of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) reports. However, as CTI reports written in natural language texts are not structured for automatic analysis, the report usage requires tedious manual efforts of threat intelligence recovery. Additionally, individual reports typically cover only a limited aspect of attack patterns (e.g., techniques) and thus are insufficient to provide a comprehensive view of attacks with multiple variants. In this paper, we propose AttacKG to automatically extract structured attack behavior graphs from CTI reports and identify the associated attack techniques. We then aggregate threat intelligence across reports to collect different aspects of techniques and enhance attack behavior graphs into technique knowledge graphs (TKGs). In our evaluation against real-world CTI reports from diverse intelligence sources, AttacKG effectively identifies 28,262 attack techniques with 8,393 unique Indicators of Compromises. To further verify the accuracy of AttacKG in extracting threat intelligence, we run AttacKG on 16 manually labeled CTI reports. Experimental results show that AttacKG accurately identifies attack-relevant entities, dependencies, and techniques with F1-scores of 0.887, 0.896, and 0.789, which outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our TKGs directly benefit downstream security practices built atop attack techniques, e.g., advanced persistent threat detection and cyber attack reconstruction.