Analysis of adversary activities using cloud-based web services to enhance cyber threat intelligence

Abstract The understanding of cyber threats to a network is challenging yet rewarding as it allows an organisation to prevent a potential attack. Numerous efforts have been made to predict cyber threat before they occur. To build a threat intelligence framework, an organisation must understand attack data collected from the network events and analyse them to identify the cyber attack artefacts such as IP address, domain name, tools and techniques, username and password, and geographic location of the attacker, which could be used to understand the nature of attack to a system or network. However, it is very difficult or dangerous to collect and analyse live data from a production system. Honeypot technology is well known for mimicking the real system while collecting actual data that can be in near real time in order to monitor the activities on the network. This paper proposes a threat intelligence approach analysing attack data collected using cloud-based web service in order to support the active threat intelligence.