MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense improves cyber defense at scale

MITRE Engenuity, a tech foundation for public good, announced the Center for Threat-Informed Defense, a collaboration with industry to improve cyber defense at scale through collaborative research and development.

Founding Research Partners are AttackIQ, Bank of America, HCA Healthcare, and JPMorgan Chase. Founding Research Sponsors are American Express, Booz Allen Hamilton, Citi, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Red Canary, Siemens, and US Bank. The Cyber Threat Alliance joins as a founding non-profit participant.

“The cybersecurity challenges that we face transcend any single organization, sector, or nation,” said Laurie Giandomenico, MITRE Engenuity CEO. “Defending against adversaries requires uniting industry across sectors to advance our abilities in threat-informed defense.”

MITRE Engenuity created the Center in response to feedback from the cybersecurity community for a non-commercial, non-profit focal point that would sustain and accelerate the evolution of publicly available resources critical to cyber defenses.

Those resources include MITRE ATT&CK, a freely available MITRE-developed and operated knowledge base of adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures that is based on published threat reporting.

Sophisticated cybersecurity teams from around the world use the knowledge base to understand adversary behavior and tradecraft and systematically advance defensive capabilities.

The Center will bring focus and coordination to this community’s R&D in threat-informed defense while helping ensure ATT&CK remains a free and open resource for all.

“Given the level of sophistication and commitment to innovation that we have seen in the global ATT&CK community, we wanted to find a new avenue to working directly with private industry,” said Richard Struse, Center director.

“Our founding participants bring a wealth of knowledge and capability along with a strong commitment to research in the public interest. MITRE Engenuity gives us the ability to work directly with these leading organizations to expand the global understanding of adversary behaviors, creating a scalable approach to conduct public interest R&D to improve our defenses.”

The Center’s initial focus will include:

• Accelerating development of ATT&CK in new ways, including expanding into new technology domains.
• Establishing a most wanted list of adversary techniques.
• Maturing and transitioning MITRE’s current ATT&CK-based security operations center assessment methodology to organizations that can deliver it at scale.
• Developing, sharing, and automating adversary emulation playbooks.

The Center’s membership will fund and participate in research and development projects, and results will be publicly shared for the benefit of all, including industry, government, and security vendors.

Members will include private sector end users and critical infrastructure organizations, leading technology companies, and cybersecurity-focused non-profits including ISACs and ISAOs.

“Cybersecurity has become a team sport,” said Jason Witty, global chief information security officer, JPMorgan Chase.

“As the threat landscape continues to evolve rapidly, collaborative research and development focused on improving cyber defense, at scale, is of critical importance. That’s why we are proud to be partnering with Center for Threat-Informed Defense to help better protect not just JPMorgan Chase but the communities that we operate in – and other institutions.”

“CTA is proud to be a founding member of the Center for Threat-Informed Defense,” said J. Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the non-profit Cyber Threat Alliance.

“While we know that certain actions can improve our collective cybersecurity, there are still problems that require research and development to get to the right answer. Since many current practices are not based on robust, empirical findings, the Center’s focused R&D efforts will help the global community address the most pressing problems.”

“It is a true privilege to collaborate with other leading members of the cybersecurity community and MITRE Engenuity in the Center for Threat-Informed Defense,” said Stephan Chenette, chief technology officer and co-founder of AttackIQ. “We believe deeply in threat-informed defense and in validating those defenses using MITRE ATT&CK.”