Pierluigi Paganini January 28, 2020

Marco Ramilli published the Cyber Threat Trends Dashboard, a useful tool that will allow us to better understand most active threats in real time.

Introduction

Information sharing is one of the most important activity that cybersecurity researchers do on daily basis. Thanks to “infosharing” activities it is possible to block or, in specific cases, to prevent cyber attacks. Most of the infosharing activities involved in cybersecurity are mostly focused on Indicator of Compromise such as: URL, IPs, Domains and file hashes which are perfectly used to arm protection tools such as: proxies, ng-firewalls and Antivirus Engines.

Collecting and analyzing public available samples every single day I became more and more interested on the Cyber threats evolution (Cyber Threats Trend) rather than specific single analyses, which after hundreds of them, could get bored (no more emotion in analyzing the next Ransomware or a new Emotet version 😛 ). Regarding APT well it’s another cup of tea (a lot of passion in understanding next steps in there). So I decided to develop a super simple dashboard showing in real time (as soon as I get analyses done) the threat trends that are observed over days. The dashboard is available HERE (on top menu TOOLS => Cyber Threat Trends). So far only few basic information are showed, if you would like to see more stats/graph/infos, please feel free to contact me (HERE).

Description

Aim of this dashboard is to monitor trends over thousands even millions of samples providing quantitative analyses on what has observed during the performed automatic analyses. The data in this dashboard is totally auto-generated without control and with no post-processing. You should consider it as raw-data where you can start to elaborate your own research and eventually where you can apply your personal filters or considerations. If you do that, you should be aware that false positives could be behind the corner Let’s move on the current graphs and let’s try to explain what I’d like to show with them but before getting in you should be aware that all the digits on the graphs are expressing percentages and not absolute numbers. Now let’s dig a little bit on them.

• Malware Families Trends. Detection distribution over time. In other words what are time-frames in where specific families are most active respect to others.
• Malware Families. Automatic Yara rules classify samples into families. Many samples were not classified in terms of families, this happens when no signatures match the samples or if multiple family signatures match the same sample. In both ways I am not sure where the sample belong with, so it would be classified as “unknown” and not visualized on this graph. Missing slice of the cake is attributed to “unknown”.
• Distribution Types. Based on the magic file bytes this graph would track the percentages of file types that Malware used as carrier.
• Threat Level Distribution. From 0 to 3 is getting more and more dangerous. It would be interesting to understand the threat level of unknown families as well, in order to understand if hidden in unknown families Malware or false positives would hide. For such a reason a dedicated graph named Unknown Families Threat Level Distribution has created.
• TOP domains, TOP processes and TOP File Names. With a sliding window of 300 last analyzed samples, the backend extracts the TOP (in terms of frequency) contacted domains, spawned processes and utilized file names. Again, there is no filter and no post-processing analysis in that fields, by meaning you could probably find as TOP domain “google.com” or “microsoft update”, which is fine, since if the sample queried them before performing its malicious intent, well, it is simply recorded and took to your attention. Same cup of tea with processes and file names.Indeed those fields are include the term “involved” into their title, if something is involved it does not mean that it is malicious , but that it is accounted to be in a malicious chain.

Conclusion

The introduced dashboard is part of my cybersecurity community contribution as every free tool released on the “Tools” menu box. Cyber Threat Trends dynamically evolves over time and you might find it useful to ask questions about live statistics on cybersecurity threats. If you are a journalist or a cybsec passionate you might find some answers to trending questions to be elaborated over time.

The Cyber Threat Trends Dashboard is available on Marco Ramilli’s blog at the following URL:

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Cyber Threat Trends Dashboard, cybersecurity)

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