Fortra threat researchers identify, analyze, and highlight emerging cyber threats by turning data from proprietary, open source, and third-party sources into actionable threat intelligence—improving analytics and empowering security decisions.
What Is the FIRE Team?
Here at Fortra, we leave
nothing to chance
Fortra Intelligence and Research Experts—our FIRE team—are skilled professionals in their fields who share a common goal of dismantling emerging exploits and creating threat-informed security solutions. With Fortra’s unique experience in defensive and offensive security, our multi-faceted FIRE team delivers a 360-degree perspective to our analysis, investigation, and threat-vetting techniques.
FIRE Team Members Include
Vulnerability researchers
Malware analysts
Data scientists
Security architects
Automation engineers
Security developers
Reverse engineers
Red and blue team experts
Fortra is proud to partner with law enforcement, global CISOs, and like-minded organizations for intelligence
sharing in the collective fight against cybercrime.
Fight Adversaries with FIRE
Fortra and the Pyramid of Pain
The Pyramid of Pain is an essential framework for breaking the attack chain. Continuous profiling of active adversaries and campaigns creates coverage from bottom to top, facilitating cyber vigilance by disrupting adversarial TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) and empowering proactive security decisions before adversaries can advance along the attack chain toward their objectives.
The pyramid illustrates the varying difficulty of obstacles attackers face when cyber defenders uncover their indicators of compromise. Targeting indicators at the bottom of the pyramid—e.g., hash values—only slightly inconveniences an attacker, since they can easily generate new hash values by simply changing the coding syntax of a malicious program.
Moving further up the pyramid, targeting indicators like adversarial TTPs is more painful for an attacker to alter because it requires threat actors to reevaluate their attack strategy, abandoning time-tested attack methods, and forces them to find new TTPs that achieve the same goal or face redesigning entire chunks of their attack sequence—even retraining other threat actors when operating as a part of organized cybercrime groups.
Fortra Threat Brain automatically addresses the Trivial, Easy, Simple, and Annoying IOCs across the pyramid, allowing our Fortra Intelligence and Research Experts (FIRE) to tackle the Challenging and Tough IOCs and disseminate timely and actionable intelligence, insights, and threat trends to our products, managed services, partners and customers.
FIRE burns through threat actors’ most complex indicators, forcing adversaries back to the drawing board.
How the FIRE Team Operates
At the core of Fortra’s advanced portfolio of cybersecurity solutions lies our dedicated cyber threat intelligence research team.
Fortra’s highly skilled FIRE team serves as the backbone of our threat research and intelligence offerings. Their continuous monitoring of the ever-evolving threat landscape and emerging threats, analysis of suspicious activity, adversary profiling, threat-hunting and investigative research capabilities allow Fortra to go beyond surface level threat indicators.
While the outputs of applied threat intelligence help various organizations fortify their security defenses by detecting, disrupting, or preventing threats, it’s the FIRE team that ensures that intelligence and research findings keep our solutions and decisions relevant and effective in an evolving threat landscape.
Fortra Security Operations Center (SOC)
The Fortra SOC is comprised of specialist detection and mitigation groups that are on the front lines of FIRE, facing continuous cybersecurity incidents, events, attacks, and threats.
The SOC’s defensive capabilities can extend both within and beyond the firewall, allowing Fortra to defend organizations with an extensive portfolio of solutions all the way from lookalike.
domain takedowns to finetuning data egress detection rules. This dedicated team is built upon multiple service lines in various industries and disciplines, which further expands Fortra’s exposure and contributions to the extensive threat landscape.
Fortra's dedicated SOC team is made up of the following cyber security disciplines:
Brand Protection
Data Loss Prevention
Extended Detection and Response
Web Application Firewall
Integrity and Compliance Monitoring
Regardless of which specific team is responding to a cyber threat, our various service lines are united through threat intelligence and research, receiving and feeding intelligence to FIRE in a virtuous cycle. For example, Fortra’s DLP analysts regularly identify malicious patterns, such as geolocations or system commands, targeting data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Additionally, Fortra brand protection analysts share IOCs that facilitate the decimation of actionable threat intelligence, including our dedicated threat intelligence sharing solution, Fortra Threat Brain. With such variety of advanced SOC capabilities, solutions, and teams, FIRE unites to contribute to our unrivaled threat intelligence and research offerings.
Fortra Research and Development (R&D)
The broader intelligence and research team at Fortra includes our research and development (R&D) technologists, who are all Fortra individuals that have a nexus around threat intelligence and protecting our customers from cyberattacks. While the Fortra SOC is focused on the disruption of threats and attack takedown efforts, the R&D team takes a broader view, such as leveraging
insights from the SOC to identify patterns that inform overall threat intelligence, research, and build the bigger picture of the threat landscape.
Our research and development team is constructed on the following three pillars:
Research
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Content
FIRE and Fortra Threat Brain
The analysts of the FIRE team consistently update Fortra Threat Brain with newly discovered threat research and intelligence, verifying and adding threat data obtained from other partner sources. In turn, FIRE draws AI-driven information from Fortra Threat Brain to enrich and apply this intelligence through advanced analytics, creating and finetuning content to help Fortra customers stay ahead of evolving threats.
By the Numbers
exfiltration attempts
blocked monthly
credential theft incidents
detected monthly
phishing, social media, domain, and open web threats mitigated monthly
vulnerabilities
tracked monthly
global threats
blocked monthly
queries to Fortra
Threat Brain monthly
