Evidence-Grounded Retrieval for Investigation Hunt Lead Generation from CTI Reports
AHLERT generates environment-aware threat hunting leads from CTI reports using ATT&CK-seeded knowledge graph retrieval, roughly doubling F1 over flat-RAG baselines.
The paper introduces AHLERT, a system that converts Cyber Threat Intelligence reports into structured, investigable hunt leads via hybrid dense retrieval with multi-hop traversal over an MITRE ATT&CK-seeded knowledge graph and ontology-grounded RAG constrained to the defender's assets. It is LLM-agnostic and evaluated on public CTI reports for well-known APTs across proprietary and open-weight models. Hybrid evidence retrieval with ontology grounding raises mean F1 from 0.44 to 0.85, and AHLERT attains the highest effectiveness score (~86.95%) versus off-the-shelf LLMs.
45