Our news is a little later than usual this month because I took a week or so holiday. Or a vacation as our US readers will call it.
It’s weird taking a holiday at home but I completely recommend it. As we are in Britain, in summer, it was obviously cold, wet and windy but we made the most of it. Time flies during this pandemic and if you haven’t yet taken some time off perhaps consider being kind to yourself and take a break? Take it easy. Take a deep breath.
Elemendar’s AI for CTI Analyst v0.0.9 is now live!
Whilst I was away, everyone else at Elemendar was working hard and we are pleased to announce that we have taken live v0.0.9 of our AI analyst, a significant upgrade. As well as improvement in a number of areas, this is a foundational update that ensures we make even more significant strides in our next release.
v0.0.9 Headlines:
- improved identification of threat actors and novel malware
- improved IOC extraction thanks to independent table extraction and analysis for HTML documents
- ground-up rewrite of refanging code to ensure correct extraction and labelling of IOCs for automated systems
- YARA rule extraction
- ground-up rewrite of text normalisation for HTML documents to separate structured data in a page (e.g. tables) from the unstructured prose and improve handling by different extraction models.
Word nerd note: Defanging is a technique used in CTI to alter dangerous URLs so they are not functional whilst you are working with them. “Refanging” is recreating them so that the correct (dangerous) link is shown in a STIX object, as it should be. Fangs, see? ?
New Risks For The Financial Sector
Our colleague Nadia Khan’s new research highlights cyber risks to the financial sector. If you work in or around this sector this article is a must read: //elemendar-uat.mytimpani.co.uk/
Things we’ve enjoyed reading this month:
This Forbes article on why AI and ML must be at the forefront of cyber.
“Art Coviello, a partner at Rally Ventures and the former chairman of RSA summarises the value of automation for cybersecurity; “There are too many things happening – too much data, too many attackers, too much of an attack surface to defend – that without those automated capabilities that you get with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you don’t have a prayer of being able to defend yourself” https://www.forbes.
Insight by Alex Newman of Thales about targeted threat intelligence generated from open source information.
https://medium.com/@alex_
The Internet is Still Made of Cats
Do you have a cat? Do you want a cat? You can have ours if you like? No sorry, you can’t have Poppy or Sherrif (except in the below pic), but you can now use a Raspberry PI with AI to work out what your cat is bringing into the house: https://www.
This is bound to be trialled by my friend Kate Bevan, the owner of Daphne the Wonder Cat and her tweeting catflap: https://twitter.com/daphneflap
That’s all for this month folks!
-Tristan
