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1.5. Diamond Model

May 11, 20247 min read

Task 1: Intro

As described by its creators, the Diamond Model is composed of four core features: adversary, infrastructure, capability, and victim, and establishes the fundamental atomic element of any intrusion activity.

You might have also noticed two additional components or axes of the Diamond Model - Social, Political and Technology

The Diamond Model can

  • help you identify the elements of an intrusion.
  • also help explain to other people who are non-technical about what happened during an event or any valuable information on the malicious threat actor.

Task 2: Adversary

An adversary is also known as an attacker, enemy, cyber threat actor, or hacker. The adversary is the person who stands behind the cyberattack.

  • Adversary Operator is the “hacker” or person(s) conducting the intrusion activity.
  • Adversary Customer is the entity that stands to benefit from the activity conducted in the intrusion. It may be the same person who stands behind the adversary operator, or it may be a separate person or group.

Questions

What is the term for a person/group that has the intention to perform malicious actions against cyber resources?

What is the term of the person or a group that will receive the benefits from the cyberattacks?

Task 3: Victim

Victim – is a target of the adversary. A victim can be an organization, person, target email address, IP address, domain, etc. It’s essential to understand the difference between the victim persona and the victim assets because they serve different analytic functions.

  • Victim Personae are the people and organizations being targeted and whose assets are being attacked and exploited. These can be organization names, people’s names, industries, job roles, interests, etc.
  • Victim Assets are the attack surface and include the set of systems, networks, email addresses, hosts, IP addresses, social networking accounts, etc., to which the adversary will direct their capabilities.

Questions

What is the term that applies to the Diamond Model for organizations or people that are being targeted?

Task 4: Capability

Capability – is also known as the skill, tools, and techniques used by the adversary in the event. The capability highlights the adversary’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

Capability Capacity is all of the vulnerabilities and exposures that the individual capability can use. 

An Adversary Arsenal is a set of capabilities that belong to an adversary. The combined capacities of an adversary’s capabilities make it the adversary’s arsenal.

Questions

Provide the term for the set of tools or capabilities that belong to an adversary.

This room has been really boring so far

Task 5: Infrastructure

Infrastructure – is also known as software or hardware. Infrastructure is the physical or logical interconnections that the adversary uses to deliver a capability or maintain control of capabilities. For example, a command and control centre (C2) and the results from the victim (data exfiltration). 

The infrastructure can also be IP addresses, domain names, email addresses, or even a malicious USB device found in the street that is being plugged into a workstation. 

Type 1 Infrastructure is the infrastructure controlled or owned by the adversary. 

Type 2 Infrastructure is the infrastructure controlled by an intermediary. Sometimes the intermediary might or might not be aware of it. This is the infrastructure that a victim will see as the adversary. Type 2 Infrastructure has the purpose of obfuscating the source and attribution of the activity. Type 2 Infrastructure includes malware staging servers, malicious domain names, compromised email accounts, etc.

Service Providers are organizations that provide services considered critical for the adversary availability of Type 1 and Type 2 Infrastructures, for example, Internet Service Providers, domain registrars, and webmail providers.

Questions

To which type of infrastructure do malicious domains and compromised email accounts belong?

What type of infrastructure is most likely owned by an adversary?

Task 6: Event Meta Features

Six possible meta-features can be added to the Diamond Model. Meta-features are not required, but they can add some valuable information or intelligence to the Diamond Model.

  • Timestamp - is the date and time of the event. Each event can be recorded with a date and time that it occurred, such as 2021-09-12 02:10:12.136.
    • The timestamp can include when the event started and stopped.
    • Timestamps are essential to help determine the patterns and group the malicious activity.
    • For example, if the intrusion or breach happened at 3 am in the United States, it might be possible that the attack was carried out from a specific country with a different time zone and standard business hours. 
  • Phase - these are the phases of an intrusion, attack, or breach. According to the Diamond Model creators and the Axiom 4, “Every malicious activity contains two or more phases which must be successfully executed in succession to achieve the desired result.” Malicious activities do not occur as single events, but rather as a sequence of events. A great example can be the Cyber Kill Chain developed by Lockheed Martin. You can find out more about the Cyber Kill Chain by visiting the Cyber Kill Chain room on TryHackMe 
  • The phases can be: 
    1. Reconnaissance
    2. Weaponization
    3. Delivery
    4. Exploitation
    5. Installation
    6. Command & Control
    7. Actions on Objective
  • Result - While the results and post-conditions of an adversary’s operations will not always be known or have a high confidence value when they are known, they are helpful to capture.
    • It is crucial to capture the results and post-conditions of an adversary’s operations, but sometimes they might not always be known.
    • The event results can be labelled as “success,” “failure,” or “unknown.” The event results can also be related to the CIA (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) triad, such as Confidentiality Compromised, Integrity Compromised, and Availability Compromised.
    • Another approach can also be documenting all of the post-conditions resulting from the event, for example, information gathered in the reconnaissance stage or successful passwords/sensitive data exfiltration.
  • Direction - This meta-feature helps describe host-based and network-based events and represents the direction of the intrusion attack. The Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis defines seven potential values for this meta-feature:
    • Victim-to-Infrastructure
    • Infrastructure-to-Victim
    • Infrastructure-to-Infrastructure
    • Adversary-to-Infrastructure
    • Infrastructure-to-Adversary
    • Bidirectional or Unknown.
  • Methodology - This meta-feature will allow an analyst to describe the general classification of intrusion, for example, phishing, DDoS, breach, port scan, etc. 
  • Resources - According to the Diamond Model, every intrusion event needs one or more external resources to be satisfied to succeed. Examples of the resources can include the following:
    • software (e.g., operating systems, virtualization software, or Metasploit framework)
    • knowledge (e.g., how to use Metasploit to execute the attack and run the exploit)
    • information (e.g., a username/password to masquerade)
    • hardware (e.g., servers, workstations, routers)
    • funds (e.g., money to purchase domains)
    • facilities (e.g., electricity or shelter)
    • access (e.g., a network path from the source host to the victim and vice versa, network access from an Internet Service Provider (ISP)).

Questions

What meta-feature does the axiom “Every malicious activity contains two or more phases which must be successfully executed in succession to achieve the desired result” belong to?

You can label the event results as “success”, “failure”, and “unknown”. What meta-feature is this related to?

To what meta-feature is this phrase applicable “Every intrusion event requires one or more external resources to be satisfied prior to success”?

Task 7: Social-Political Component

The social-political component describes the needs and intent of the adversary, for example, financial gain, gaining acceptance in the hacker community, hacktivism, or espionage.

Task 8: Technology Component

Technology – the technology meta-feature or component highlights the relationship between the core features: capability and infrastructure.

The capability and infrastructure describe how the adversary operates and communicates. A scenario can be a watering-hole attack which is a methodology where the adversary compromises legitimate websites that they believe their targeted victims will visit.

Task 9: Practice Analysis

Deploy the static site attached to this task and dive into the case study and extract the information needed to populate our Diamond Model.

Task 10: Conclusion

The Diamond Model is a scientific method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of intrusion analysis. With this in your arsenal, you will have opportunities to leverage real-time intelligence for network defence and predict adversary operations.

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