This time, we’re not revealing a new cyber threat investigation or analysis, but I want to share some insights about the team behind all Sekoia Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering reports. Let me introduce you to the Sekoia TDR team.

An operational and research team

TDR is the Threat Detection & Research team at Sekoia.io. Our main mission is to protect our Sekoia SOC Platform customers and partners by producing native and exclusive Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) and developing our integrated detection rules catalogue.

As cybersecurity is a collaborative effort, we regularly cooperate and share intelligence with our MSSP and technology partners, various other cybersecurity vendors, and their CTI teams.

We also regularly collaborate with cybersecurity authorities, CERT communities, and law enforcement agencies ( including Europol) to fight cybercrime globally.

Our organisation

Founded in 2020, TDR is a multidisciplinary team of around twenty passionate analysts with a wide range of expertise: detection engineering, technical and strategic analysis, threat hunting, reverse engineering, DevOps, etc. Our analysts have experience in defensive security from SOCs and CERTs, but some also have background in geopolitics or offensive security. They are primarily based in our offices in Rennes and Paris, while part of the team works fully remotely from various cities across France.

TDR is organised around 2 threat-themed squads and 4 chapters of expertise. Each squad is staffed by at least one analyst from each chapter to provide a 360° view of threats by tracking, contextualising, technically analysing and detecting them.

The Squads

🐙The ‘Octopus’ squad focuses on state-sponsored and strategic threats, such as cyber mercenaries and hacktivists. 

🦊The ‘Fox’ squad tracks down financially motivated cybercriminal threats, such as Ransomware-as-a-Service, Business Email Compromise, Phishing-as-a-Service, loader, etc.

The Chapters

Strategic

The Strategic Chapter is composed of analysts with a geopolitical background. They provide context on cyber threats and the ecosystem around them from a geographical and sectoral perspective.

Detect

The Detection & Hunting Chapter comprises detection engineers whose main task is to create and update the detection rules (Sigma, Sigma Correlation and Anomaly) available in the catalogue that is integrated into the Sekoia SOC Platform. To do this, they use our TDR Lab to simulate tools / malware or to replay attacks, analysing the logs left behind to create relevant rules for detecting malicious behaviour. They are also in charge of various TDR honeypot projects.

Reverse

Finally, the Reverse Engineering Chapter is formed by reverse engineers who technically analyse malicious code to better understand, track, and detect it. They are particularly responsible for creating malware configuration extractors to automate the production of IOCs.

Find out more about our reverse engineering work, with this in-deph technical analysis report on the DiceLoader malware.

The day-to-day life of TDR analysts

The day-to-day work of TDR analysts varies according to their core expertise but can be categorised into two main activities:

Threat Intelligence

Our priority is to provide actionable intelligence on cyber adversaries, their motivation, their victimology, the malware they use, the vulnerabilities they exploit and their TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) to better understand and detect malicious activities. 

• Monitoring through a wide range of internal, commercial and open sources
• Capitalising and modelling in STIX 2.1 of the most relevant reports from the cyber community on the threats we track with priority. Most of these reports are also enriched with YARAs and new IOCs based on pivots.

• Monitoring and tracking of intrusion sets, threat actors and their tools and malware
• Investigating using open sources (including deep and dark web) and our exclusive telemetry
• Writing private Threat Intelligence reports (FLINTs – Sekoia FLash INTelligence reports) and blog posts to share emerging threats, new attack campaigns or trends enriched with technical and strategic analysis.

Detection Engineering

We aim to provide our users with the most comprehensive catalogue of detection rules, enabling them to quickly detect the TTPs most commonly used by adversaries. Our rule creation efforts focus on the following areas: endpoint for workstations and servers, network outbound/inbound connections, cloud office applications, and identity management.

• Creating Sigma and Sigma Correlation detection rules or Anomaly rules to detect the TTPs most commonly used by attackers to compromise Windows, Linux, Mac or Cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform) environments.
• Updating catalogue rules to improve quality (reducing the number of false positives, for example).
• Implementing and maintaining the rule creation workflow (CI/CD pipeline). For further details, see our dedicated blog post on XDR detection engineering at scale.
• Creating a managed threat-hunting capability for our customers and partners.
• Writing reports and blog posts.

To find out more about the TDR detection strategy, we have documented the most frequently asked questions in the Sekoia.io documentation.

Our R&D and publications

TDR is an operational team responsible for producing on a daily basis the Sekoia exclusive CTI and the detection rules for our SOC Platform. In addition, we also operate as a research team dedicated to investigating and detecting the latest cyber threats alongside developing our own R&D projects to improve our knowledge of cyber threats and their tracking/detection. R&D also includes developing internal tools analysts use to conduct investigations and to manage various honeypots projects.

Tooling

To discover new threats, speed up investigations and help non-technical analysts, we continue to develop new, in-house applications and projects such as honeypots (Windows, Linux, Edge devices/ IOT). All these internal tools are interconnected with our Sekoia SOC Platform and with third-party services to make life easier for analysts. For example, with ASTRA, we have a Cloud lab for easily detonating malware and collecting logs / raising alerts in our SOC Platform. Reversers also use it to carry out their malware analysis work. ARIANE is an online rule editor (YARA, Suricata, Sigma) who helps analysts write effective rules. We also share some of our tools, such as various Maltego transforms thanks to Félix.

Sharing is Caring

As sharing is one of our core values, we regularly publish the results of our TLP:CLEAR research on the Sekoia.io blog and on our Twitter/X account. IOCs, Sigma, and YARA rules are also available in the Sekoia.io Community on GitHub.

Last but not least, some of our research work has also been presented at international cybersecurity conferences such as BotConf and Virus Bulletin.

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Feel free to contact us at – tdr @ sekoia.io – if you want to collaborate on research and investigations into state-sponsored or cybercriminal threats.

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