arXiv subjects

Louis Hackländer-Jansen

Publications and source records attributed to Louis Hackländer-Jansen.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Bounty Hunter: Autonomous, Comprehensive Emulation of Multi-Faceted Adversaries

Adversary emulation is an essential procedure for cybersecurity assessments such as evaluating an organization's security posture or facilitating structured training and research in dedicated environments. To allow for systematic and time-efficient assessments, several approaches from academia and industry have worked towards the automation of adversarial actions. However, they exhibit significant limitations regarding autonomy, tactics coverage, and real-world applicability. Consequently, adversary emulation remains a predominantly manual task requiring substantial human effort and security expertise - even amidst the rise of large language models. In this paper, we present Bounty Hunter, an automated adversary emulation method, designed and implemented as an open-source plugin for the popular adversary emulation platform Caldera, that enables autonomous emulation of adversaries with multi-faceted behavior while providing a wide coverage of tactics. To this end, it realizes diverse adversarial behavior, such as different levels of detectability and varying attack paths across repeated emulations. By autonomously compromising a simulated enterprise network, Bounty Hunter showcases its ability to achieve given objectives without prior knowledge of its target, including pre-compromise, initial compromise, and post-compromise attack tactics. Overall, Bounty Hunter facilitates autonomous, comprehensive, and multi-faceted adversary emulation to help researchers and practitioners in performing realistic and time-efficient security assessments as well as research and training in intrusion detection, incident response, and forensic analysis.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Can Risk-Based Alerting Mitigate Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue?

Security operations centers (SOCs) face large numbers of false alerts, making detection of cyberattacks difficult under typical resource constraints. Risk-based alerting (RBA) has been proposed as a means to reduce false alerts and has reportedly succeeded in doing so in various enterprise deployments. However, RBA has not been comprehensively evaluated until now, leaving implementation mostly guesswork based on anecdotal evidence. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of RBA. To this end, we reformulate it as a continuous alert prioritization problem rather than a binary decision problem (i.e., whether an alerting threshold is exceeded), allowing us to evaluate performance across all possible thresholds and thus model SOCs of varying sizes and alert volumes. We distill five fundamental risk hypotheses, formalize them as independently parametrizable modules, and implement them in our novel experimentation suite CATS. We thoroughly assess the hypotheses across eight diverse alert datasets, six of which we created or extended to make such an evaluation possible. Our results show that certain combinations of hypotheses achieve a remarkable alert prioritization performance (AUROC $μ=0.92$, $σ=0.09$ across the eight datasets), outperforming a straightforward prioritization by alert severity level (AUROC $μ=0.72$, $σ=0.21$). We conclude that RBA can substantially reduce the number of false alerts that analysts have to review and thus has the potential to mitigate cybersecurity alert fatigue. In addition, it serves as a strong baseline for more complex, resource-intensive alert triage approaches (e.g., based on large language models).

cs.CR↗