As group leader for Cyber Adversary Engagement at MITRE Corp., Maretta Morovitz sees value in getting to know the enemy – she can use knowledge about cyber adversaries to distract, trick, and deflect them and develop strategies to help keep threat actors from getting whatever they’re after.
That could mean placing decoys and lures that exploit their expectations for what an attacker will find when they first hack into an environment, she says. Or it could mean deliberately disorienting them by creating scenarios that don’t match up to those expectations. “It’s about how to drive defenses by knowing how the adversaries actually behave,” says Morovitz, who is also group leader for MITRE Engage, a cyber adversary engagement framework.