Adversarial Tradecraft in Cybersecurity

5

Active Manipulation

When you encounter your opponent before they are aware of your presence, you can gain a unique opportunity to tamper with their perception. By tampering with the opponent before they notice your presence, you can further hinder their ability to detect your existence. This can be risky as it involves active deception, but it can pay great dividends when pulled off successfully. While the attacker's methodology can embrace this deception, with techniques such as log deletion and the use of rootkits, the defenders can also invoke active manipulation to slow down attackers in their environment. They can remove the offense's ability to operate effectively, frustrate malicious actors in their environment, and ultimately increase ...