MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud: Adoption and Value Study by UC Berkeley CLTC

Are you prepared to detect and defend against attacks that target your data in cloud services, or apps you’ve built that are hosted in the cloud? 

With that visibility, you can establish full control over end-user activity and data in the cloud, applying your policy at every entry and exit point to the cloud.  

The first step to developing a strong cloud security posture is visibility over the often hundreds of services your employees use, what data is within these services, and then how they are being used collaboratively with third parties and other destinations outside of your control. 

Our Research to Uncover the Best Solution  

Most enterprise security operations centers (SOCs) use MITRE ATT&CK to map the events they see in their environment to a common language of adversary tactics and techniques. This helps to understand gaps in protection, model how attackers progress from access to exfiltration (or encryption/destruction), and to plan out security policy decisions.  

That covers your risk stemming from legitimate use by employees, external collaborators, and even API-connected marketplace apps, but what about your adversaries? If someone phished your CEO, stole their OneDrive credentials and exfiltrated data, would you know? What if your CEO used the same password across multiple accounts, and the adversary had access to apps like Smartsheet, Workday, or Salesforce? Are you set up to detect this kind of multi-cloud attack? 

In collaboration with the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) and MITRE, we sought to uncover how enterprises investigate threats in the cloud, with a focus on MITRE ATT&CK. In this initiative, researchers from UC Berkeley CLTC conducted a survey of 325 enterprises in a wide range of industries, with 1K employees or above, split between the US, UK, and Australia. The Berkeley team also conducted 10 in-depth interviews with security leaders in various cybersecurity functions.  

The original ATT&CK framework applied to Windows/Mac/Linux environments, with Android/iOS included as well. For cloud environments, the MITRE ATT&CK framework has a shorter history (released October 2019), but is quickly gaining adoption as the model for cloud threat investigation.  

Findings 

MITRE has done an excellent job identifying and categorizing adversary tactics and techniques used in the cloud. When asked about the prevalence of these tactics observed in their environment, 81% of our survey respondents had experienced each of the tactics in the Cloud Matrix on average. 58% had experienced the initial access phase of an attack at least monthly. 

Given the frequency in which most enterprises experience these adversary tactics and techniques, we found widespread adoption of the ATT&CK Cloud Matrix, with 97% of our respondents either planning to or already using the Matrix. 

One of the most promising benefits of MITRE ATT&CK is the unification of events derived from endpoints, network traffic, and the cloud together into a common language. Right now, only 39% of enterprises correlate events from these three environments in their threat investigation. Further adoption of MITRE ATT&CK over time will unlock the ability to efficiently investigate attacks that span multiple environments, such as a compromised endpoint accessing cloud data and exfiltrating to an adversary destination. 

In the full report, we explore deeper implications of using MITRE ATT&CK for Cloud, including consensus on the value it brings to enterprise organizations, challenges with implementation, and many more interesting results from our investigation. Head to the full report here to dive in.  

Dive into the full research report for more on these findings! 

This research demonstrates promising potential for MITRE ATT&CK in the enterprise SOC, with downstream benefits for the business. 87% of our respondents stated that adoption of MITRE ATT&CK will improve cloud security in their organization, with another 79% stating that it would also make them more comfortable with cloud adoption overall. A safer transition to cloud-based collaboration and app development can accelerate businesses, a subject we’ve investigated in the past2. MITRE ATT&CK can play a key role in secure cloud adoption, and defense of the enterprise overall.  

1https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/forms/gated-form.html?docID=3804edf6-fe75-427e-a4fd-4eee7d189265&eid=LAVVPBCF  

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2https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/forms/gated-form.html?docID=75e3a9dc-793e-488a-8d8a-8dbf31aa5d62&eid=5PES9QHP