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[Crowdstrike] Correct crowdstrike taxonomy #3532

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@initstring initstring commented Mar 1, 2025

Proposed changes

  • Update CrowdStrike connector to use correct vocabulary mapping

Related issues

Checklist

  • I consider the submitted work as finished
  • I tested the code for its functionality using different use cases
  • I added/update the relevant documentation (either on github or on notion)
  • Where necessary I refactored code to improve the overall quality

Further comments

CrowdStrike uses these three "motivations" today:

  • State-Sponsored
  • Criminal
  • Hacktivism

Those are the only categories available for sorting in their web UI.

To confirm, I did a bulk scan of actors on the CrowdStrike API, looking for all iterations of motivation that may be returned. Almost all actors use State-Sponsored, Criminal, or Hacktivism (this also matches their web UI query fields). There seems to be some legacy entries using defacement, so I included it as well.

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initstring commented Mar 1, 2025

An alternative solution to this might be to completely remove this manual mapping, and allow OpenCTI admins to simply alias the vocabulary themselves in the platform. That would probably be more resilient to future changes on CrowdStrike's side.

@helene-nguyen helene-nguyen changed the title Correct crowdstrike taxonomy [Crowdstrike] Correct crowdstrike taxonomy Mar 1, 2025
Signed-off-by: GitHub <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: GitHub <[email protected]>
@initstring initstring force-pushed the crowdstrike-vocab-update branch from 177294b to a2caa32 Compare March 3, 2025 01:07
@helene-nguyen helene-nguyen added this to the PRs backlog milestone Mar 4, 2025
@helene-nguyen helene-nguyen added the community use to identify PR from community label Mar 4, 2025
@Jipegien
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Jipegien commented Mar 6, 2025

Thank you @initstring for your contribution! :)

Before merging:

  • no reduction of mapping scope to be 100% sure we don't generate "breaking" change here, as we have no control or assurance that Crowdstrike won't use _CS_MOTIVATION_DESTRUCTION and _CS_MOTIVATION_ESPIONAGE again.
  • _CS_MOTIVATION_STATE_SPONSORED: "organizational-gain" seems really odd to me. Are you implying that Crowdstrike only uses "State Sponsored" for espionage-focus Threat Actors?

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initstring commented Mar 9, 2025

Hi @Jipegien - thanks for the reply!

I only observe CrowdStrike using the categories I mention. I will open a support case to confirm.

However, I think it's worth considering completely removing this mapping. As we can see, it creates warnings when not working as expected and simply adds no motivation at all.

Perhaps it is better to consume whatever motivation CrowdStrike provides, and then allow individual OpenCTI admins to use those as-is or to configure aliases that make sense to them?

There's no guarantee CrowdStrike won't simply change this tomorrow, and this function will break again.

Let me know what you think and I can re-do the PR. Either way, I'll see what support comes back with in terms of their taxonomy.

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4 participants