In cybersecurity, timing is everything. By the time you’ve blocked a malicious domain published on a threat feed, chances are that the attacker has already spun up a dozen more. Similarly, blocking command-and-control that you discover solely by detonating malware and looking at the telemetry ignores all the bad actors who regularly update their C2 faster than you can modify your block list. Threat actors don’t stand still – they evolve their infrastructure constantly, like a criminal swapping license plates to stay ahead of the police.
That’s why infrastructure intelligence is so important, and where real-time behavioral profiling comes in.
Think of it like criminal profiling, but for adversary infrastructure. Instead of only cataloging domains, IPs, or ASNs, we monitor and track the infrastructure’s pattern of life and how the infrastructure changes over time.
By mapping this behavior, we don’t just know what infrastructure an attacker is using, we can uncover a pattern of how they operate.
Many organizations still rely heavily on lists and feeds – point-in-time snapshots of badness. The problem? These indicators age fast. Threat actors, especially well-funded ones, can rotate infrastructure in hours or even minutes. Without a dynamic view, defenders are always one step behind.
Infrastructure behavior, however, is harder to mask. Just like a handwriting sample, an adversary’s infrastructure habits often stay consistent even when the individual domains or IPs change. And that’s just part of the reason that infrastructure intelligence is the attacker’s Achilles Heel.
Real-time profiling focuses on the how, not just the what. Some examples:
With behavioral profiling, we can detect pre-attack signals, often days, weeks, or even months before the first phishing email, ransomware dropper, or fraud attempt. The benefits are clear:
Recently, HYAS observed a healthcare-focused threat actor with a telltale pattern: bursts of domain registrations at 3 AM UTC, all using a low-cost registrar in a specific country, hosted on VPS providers with a history of abuse. Within 72 hours, they registered 20 new domains.
Real-time profiling flagged this activity immediately. With HYAS Protect, clients were automatically shielded as the domains were preemptively blocked before weaponization.
HYAS doesn’t just look at a frozen picture of the threat landscape, the HYAS Adversary Infrastructure Platform is constantly updating, adapting, and changing to reflect a real-time view of the adversary, their infrastructure, and their assets. This infrastructure intelligence not just continually tracks various IOCs for correlation, combination, and pattern tracking, but delivers real-time, actionable intelligence for your SIEM, SOAR, XDR, Firewall, or other aspect of your security stack in real time. Additionally, the intelligence can be mined in real-time for not just critical answers when chasing down cyber criminals, but for analysis and observations tracking financial compliance, money-laundering, fraud, and even human-trafficking and child exploitation.
The result? You stop chasing yesterday’s indicators and start predicting tomorrow’s attacks.
The best defense is a good offense, and the best way to stop an attack is to spot it before it starts. Let’s talk about how HYAS can help you see what others miss, and act before the adversary moves.