S1E06.1: Special Black Hat Edition: Katie Nickels

State of the Hack

“Special Guest Katie Nickels (@likethecoins)”: Katie Nickels attended
a liberal arts school and intended to get into journalism, but instead
she took on a researcher role and the rest is history. Now Katie is
the Lead Cyber Security Engineer at MITRE. MITRE is a not-for-profit
that operates federally funded research and development centers
(FFRDC) responsible for R&D that helps the U.S. government. Katie
specializes in cyber threat intelligence and how it can improve
network defenses. Part of that involves applying threat intelligence
to ATT&CK, a knowledge base of real-world attacker tactics, techniques
and procedures (TTPs) that is used to assist analysts. Very cool
stuff! During our chat, Katie talked about how her team processes new
intel as it’s made public (she said she was really excited about our
latest FIN7 blog post – thanks Katie!), and about a new ATT&CK
philosophy paper MITRE recently released that describes the
collaborative process of incorporating new TTPs. We also talked about
PRE-ATT&CK, which focuses on what threat actors do to prepare for an
attack, such as reconnaissance and weaponizing.