Leveraging Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Against the Cyber Kill Chain

July 07, 2023

When it comes to cybersecurity threat exposure, preparedness is vital in limiting damage to your systems. Thinking like your attacker and how they might follow through with an attack reveals a great deal of insight into your preparedness. Given the incredible growth of the threat landscape, it bodes well for your organization to draw out a complete portrait of its cybersecurity posture.

Organizations today pay attention to their internal environment and employ numerous tools and assessments to fortify their cybersecurity posture. While the tools reveal security vulnerabilities and the assessments measure the effectiveness of existing security measures, organizations assuming these alone are sufficient ultimately fail to consider the bigger picture. They are blindsided by the critical business information that is already publicly accessible. Therefore, mimicking the actions of a threat actor helps your organization to enhance its cybersecurity posture to tackle the latest threats. It provides your security professionals an external outlook of the organization’s vulnerabilities. This is where incorporating OSINT analysis becomes pivotal.

Open-source intelligence or OSINT is a powerful tool that enables organizations to take a comprehensive look at their online footprint. It is an intelligence-gathering exercise that collects online and publicly available information to infer valuable insights about an organization, such as the organization’s capabilities and information about its infrastructure (such as open ports, vulnerable software, leaked confidential data, etc.). Armed with this information, organizations can devise effective countermeasures for potential cyber incidents. With the scale and the pace of growth of the global threat landscape, it is prudent for organizations to incorporate OSINT in their defensive capabilities.

By utilizing OSINT, the publicly accessible information itself becomes a vital ally in securing your organization. Mapping OSINT against the cyber kill chain helps organizations trace the steps of a malicious actor and identify opportunities to enhance their arsenal against these cyber threats. The cyber kill chain is a framework developed by Lockheed Martin to describe the modus operandi of a cyberattack. In seven steps, the cyber kill chain expounds the phases involved in identifying, targeting and engaging a victim system. Mapping OSINT techniques with the kill chain presents organizations with a means to anticipate cyberattacks and be prepared. OSINT provides insights into potential attack surfaces through each step of the kill chain and enables security professionals to deploy relevant security controls to mitigate them.

Here is a snapshot of how OSINT connects with the cyber kill chain:

Just as attackers rely on OSINT to strategize and carry out their cyberattacks, OSINT can be a potent countermeasure for cybersecurity professionals against the same cyber threats. Our article – Disrupting the Cyber Kill Chain Using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) – showcases how security professionals can leverage OSINT to protect their organizations across the various phases of the cyber kill chain.

The unprecedented scale and growth of the threat landscape make it mission-critical for organizations to deploy mechanisms that prevent potential mishaps. If you have questions about how you can employ OSINT to your advantage or if you seek to craft a resilient cyber strategy, click here to learn more about what we do at Optiv, or drop us a line.