S1E06.1: Special Black Hat Edition: Katie Nickels

“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.