Security analysts need clear visibility into potential threats to proactively defend against cyberattacks. Defining these threats can be challenging, but many security teams rely on the MITRE ATT&CK^® framework as a foundational resource for strengthening their defenses. While security platforms tag detections with MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques, analysts often struggle to assess their overall coverage across different attack surfaces. To maintain an effective SIEM strategy, organizations need a way to easily visualize their threat detection coverage, identify gaps, and ensure that their security operations monitoring is aligned with real-world attack behaviors.

The Datadog Cloud SIEM MITRE ATT&CK Map helps solve these challenges by giving security teams a comprehensive view of their detection coverage. The feature maps defenses to MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques, and it includes custom detections and built-in detections contributed by Datadog security researchers and engineers. Analysts can explore coverage through an interactive heatmap, filter by data sources or platforms, and pinpoint gaps in their security strategy. The MITRE ATT&CK Map side panel enhances this experience by displaying color-coded detection counts, linking techniques to MITRE ATT&CK descriptions, and offering quick creation of detection rules with automatically populated tactics and techniques. With real-time visibility into enabled rules and their data sources, security teams can refine their SIEM strategy and stay aligned with real-world attack behaviors.

In this post, we’ll explain how the MITRE ATT&CK Map helps security teams:

• Understand detection coverage at a glance
• Improve detection coverage and streamline rule creation

Understand detection coverage at a glance

The MITRE ATT&CK Map visualizer and heatmap offer a comprehensive, interactive view of detection coverage across tactics and techniques, helping security teams assess how well their rules cover critical attack methods. Integrated within the Datadog Cloud SIEM detection rule explorer, the heatmap helps you easily visualize threat detection across various tactics and techniques. Detection rule counts are displayed across multiple log sources analyzed by Cloud SIEM, including AWS CloudTrail and other key data sources. The primary view highlights the sources and associated rules that Cloud SIEM is analyzing, while the secondary view expands coverage to include all offered built-in content and custom content.

Tagged custom rules that are associated with specific tactics and techniques are automatically applied to the MITRE ATT&CK Map. This functionality offers a clear view of detection coverage and facilitates more targeted detection rule analysis. You can refine your analysis in the visualizer by using multiple filters—such as rule density, log source, default status, tactic, technique, and platform—to focus on specific problem areas and attack surfaces. The following screen capture shows how you can filter and view specific rules.

The MITRE ATT&CK Map enhances understanding by providing brief descriptions when you hover your mouse pointer over tactics, and it includes a legend for clear data mapping. This comprehensive visualization empowers teams to quickly analyze, prioritize, and strengthen their security posture.

Improve detection coverage and streamline rule creation

The MITRE ATT&CK Map side panel provides the ability to analyze detection rules by technique to view technique coverage. Rule density, the number of rules enabled for each technique, is visually represented through threshold-based color mapping and detection counts. With this information, you can gauge the intensity of threats at a glance. Each technique on the map is also linked to additional resources, providing direct access to detailed information on the MITRE ATT&CK framework page.

The MITRE ATT&CK Map side panel provides visibility into all rules, allowing you to control which rules are active or disabled. Additionally, you can map rules to their data sources and tag detections with MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques directly within the embedded experience. This functionality simplifies threat correlation across platforms and ensures that defenses reflect real-world attack behaviors. You can also use platform tags and filters to refine analysis across attack surfaces to gain a clearer understanding of potential coverage gaps.

If you identify gaps in coverage, you can quickly create custom rules with pre-populated tactic and technique tags that make the rule creation process more efficient. The custom rule editor is accessible from within the MITRE ATT&CK Map side panel, where tactic and technique tags are automatically populated when you fill out the Describe your Playbook section. The following screen capture shows this functionality.

To complete the creation of your new custom detection rule, you can specify your detection method, define the search query and conditions, and add details to the playbook. For more information, see the documentation about detection rules.

Start identifying detection gaps and improving detection visibility today

Security teams can enhance their defenses and proactively address evolving threats by using the Datadog Cloud SIEM MITRE ATT&CK Map to gain valuable insights into potential detection gaps and fortify their overall visibility. Try out the MITRE ATT&CK Map today to enhance your understanding of your detection coverage. To get started, check out the MITRE ATT&CK Map documentation.

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