How to Actually Leverage the MITRE ATT&CK Framework in Security Operations
Cybersec Café #73 - 06/24/25
The MITRE ATT&CK Framework is one of the most recognized and most referenced knowledge bases in the blue team community. And for good reason.
At its core, ATT&CK maps out the tactics and techniques real-world threat actors use across the full attack lifecycle.
For Security Operations teams, it can be a powerful tool: a way to align your defensive strategy towards specific adversarial behaviors, to identify gaps, and to mature your detection capabilities.
But too often I see MITRE ATT&CK get ignored, misunderstood, or just barely scratched at the surface.
Why? Maybe it’s because there are too many cybersecurity frameworks floating around and it’s difficult to tell which ones are worth your time.
Or maybe…
It’s because everyone tells you about MITRE ATT&CK, but no one’s shown you how to make the framework work for you in a way that’s integrated, contextual, and scalable.
So in this article, we’ll break down how to use the Framework to assess coverage, identify blind spots, and improve your Security Operations function in ways that actually move the needle.
A Brief History
The MITRE ATT&CK Framework was first developed in 2013 by MITRE, a non-profit created to support the US Government with technical expertise and threat intelligence..
ATT&CK stands for Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge - and the goal was simple: document how real-world attackers behave based on publicly available intelligence.
It became publicly available in 2015, and since then, it’s grown into a community-driven framework that is constantly evolving as researchers and threat hunters discover new techniques.
Today, it's one of the most practical resources security teams have to simulate attacker behavior, strengthen their defenses, and build more threat-informed detection strategies.
The Framework
The MITRE ATT&CK Framework is made up of two core components: Tactics and Techniques.
Tactics represent what an attacker is trying to achieve - their technical objective during a specific phase of an intrusion. Think of them as high-level categories or goals that shape an adversary’s behavior throughout the attack lifecycle.
As of now, there are 14 Tactics in the Enterprise ATT&CK Matrix:
Reconnaissance: Gathering information about the target, either actively or passively.
Resource Development: Acquiring infrastructure or resources (like domains or malware) for future use.
Initial Access: Gaining a foothold within the target environment.
Execution: Running malicious code on a victim system.
Persistence: Establishing mechanisms to maintain access over time.
Privilege Escalation: Gaining higher-level permissions within the environment.
Defense Evasion: Avoiding detection while moving through the network.
Credential Access: Attempting to steal account credentials.
Discovery: Learning about the internal environment.
Lateral Movement: Moving from one system to another.
Collection: Gathering data of interest from internal systems.
Command and Control (C2): Communicating with compromised systems to maintain control.
Exfiltration: Removing stolen data from the environment.
Impact: Disrupting availability, integrity, or the business itself.
Techniques explain how those Tactics are achieved. Each Technique is a specific method used by attackers - like phishing for Initial Access, or credential dumping for Credential Access. These techniques are more granular, and many of them even come with sub-techniques to break things down even further.
There are currently about 200 Techniques and 400 Sub-Techniques, so listing them all here isn’t really plausible. But, I encourage you to explore the full framework here.
Remember:
Tactics give you the big picture.
Techniques provide the details you can actually build around.
Once you understand that structure, you can start to align your security strategy more directly against real-world threats.
Prepare for a career in Cybersecurity, one sip at a time with The Security Sip. With rapidly evolving threats and technologies, many struggle to gain the right skills and experience to break into the cybersecurity industry. This course is designed to transform beginners into industry-ready professionals over 12 sections, 85 modules, and 155 exercises. Check it out!
The Framework in Practice
Yes, MITRE ATT&CK can absolutely help your security posture, benchmark your maturity, identify blind spots, and even communicate more clearly with stakeholders.
But here’s the truth: None of that matters if you’re not actively measuring and applying it across your entire operation.
It’s easy to reference MITRE ATT&CK in passing, but much harder to integrate it in a way that can drive your day-to-day efforts and prioritization.
So, here’s how you put it to work.
Detection Engineering
The most straightforward way to operationalize MITRE ATT&CK is through your detection suite.
Start by thinking of the framework as your creative springboard. Break the mold of just thinking of writing detections against your tooling, and leverage it to build logic around real adversary techniques.
Start tagging your detections with their corresponding Tactic and Technique IDs. This unlocks a new level of visibility and measurement across your detection program, specifically in 2 areas.
Coverage: Tagging your detections gives you a birds-eye view of your detection footprint. You’ll be able to quickly spot redundancies based on over representation of techniques, and gaps based on underrepresented tactics. This becomes a feedback loop and can be used to prioritize new detections, rebalance existing coverage, and to better align your strategy across the board. Mature teams can do this proactively, but any team can benefit from laying a solid foundation early.
Surface: Once alerts start flowing in, you can begin correlating alert volume by Tactic and Technique to the quality of your detections. Think about True/False positive ratios, high/low signal counts, and any reports of alert fatigue. Over time, this gives you a clearer picture of your active attack surface and allows you to tune your detection coverage to match your unique risk profile.
If you want to mature your detection engineering function, tagging with MITRE isn’t just nice to have - it’s foundational and sets you up to make smarter decisions, decrease gaps, and give you more resilience over time.
Threat Hunting
MITRE ATT&CK can be a powerful launchpad for structured threat hunts.
As a hunter, you can leverage the framework to focus your efforts on known gaps in your detection coverage. Whether it’s a technique you’re missing entirely or just one that has limited visibility, ATT&CK helps you align your hunts with actual risk rather than just intuition and news.
Start by combining your MITRE mapping with internal knowledge about your environment. Then layer in OSINT or public threat intelligence to build out hypothesis-driven hunts that target specific behaviors, sub-techniques, or IOCs.
Even when engaging in unstructured hunts, your knowledge of your current MITRE coverage can still act as a compass. It gives your exploration focus while still giving you the creative freedom that comes with unstructured threat hunts.
But don’t just stop with the hunt itself.
Any findings (missed activity, detection gaps, new hypotheses) should feed right back into your detection lifecycle. This keeps your detection engineering function agile yet always grounded in the reality of your security posture.
Incident Response
Incidents are the most honest indicators of where your defenses fall short.
Each phase of an incident can be mapped back to specific MITRE ATT&CK techniques or subtechniques, giving you insights into the tactics that slipped through the cracks. And since incidents are multi-layered, you’ll usually uncover several techniques from a single event.
The key is to track them.
Failing to tag incidents to ATT&CK tactics and techniques, or worse - failing to review those analytics over time, is a major missed opportunity.
Why? Because that data shows not only where you were weak in the moment, but where you might be consistently vulnerable over time.
When tracked properly, incident data can feed:
Your detection engineering priorities
Your threat hunting hypotheses
Your training and tabletop exercise planning
If you want your incident response program to mature, start treating every incident as a feedback loop. MITRE ATT&CK is that added layer to give you structure and a foundation to do it in a measurable, repeatable way.
The SecOps ATT&CK Ecosystem
By now, it’s clear: MITRE ATT&CK weaves through every layer of your Security Operations function.
When used intentionally, it becomes a unifying thread that connects each discipline, encourages collaboration, drives prioritization, and builds maturity.
Alerts: SOC Analysts can use ATT&CK mappings to help prioritize triage, choose accurate classifications when closing alerts, and provide structured feedback to Detection Engineers.
Detection Engineering: Detection Engineers can map their detection suite to ATT&CK to assess coverage, reduce redundancy, and prioritize new detections based on gaps.
Threat Hunting: Threat Hunters can form hypotheses grounded in uncovered gaps, launching hunts that directly target under-monitored behaviors or subtechniques.
Incident Response: Responders can map incident activity to ATT&CK to understand the full attack path, identify defensive breakdowns, and generate action items during post-mortem.
Leaders: By building the framework into your processes, managers and executives can leverage metrics that give a clear picture of operational maturity.
But still want to take it a step further?
Use it to drive your purple teaming exercises. Leverage the framework to simulate attacks that specifically target underrepresented techniques in your detection suite. This lets you validate existing detections, strengthen controls, and spot your gaps.
💬 Are you using MITRE ATT&CK as part of your security strategy? Or are you leveraging other frameworks? Let me know below!
Another Iterative Piece to the Process
If you’ve been reading the Cybersec Café for a while, you’ve probably noticed a recurring theme: iteration is everything in Security Operations. And that’s by design.
Each key pillar of SecOps feeds into the others. And the MITRE ATT&CK Framework isn’t just another checkbox, it’s a platform that helps you align those pillars to build with purpose and evolve with intention.
This framework becomes even more valuable as your team matures. The last thing you want is to find yourself:
Wasting time building redundant detections
Accumulating tech debt from untagged rules
Hunting in well-covered areas while blind spots go unchecked
Skipping improvement items in incident reviews because you lack structure
Put simply, if you’re not using MITRE ATT&CK to guide your growth, you’re not measuring your security posture in its entirety.
MITRE ATT&CK is a mindset that brings structure and strategy to your operations. Use it early. Use it often. And let it evolve with your team.
Securely Yours,
Ryan G. Cox
Just a heads up, The Cybersec Cafe's got a pretty cool weekly cadence.
Every week, expect to dive into the hacker’s mindset in our Methodology Walkthroughs or explore Deep Dive articles on various cybersecurity topics.
. . .
Oh, and if you want even more content and updates, hop over to Ryan G. Cox on Twitter/X or my Website. Can't wait to keep sharing and learning together!