Threat Actor Profiles

Validin supports threat actor profiling by providing long-term visibility into the infrastructure, behaviour, and tooling associated with named threat activity.

Rather than relying on single indicators or isolated detections, Validin allows teams to build profiles based on observed infrastructure patterns, historical changes, and documented external research.

How Validin’s data supports threat actor profiling

Profiling activities in Validin draws on DNS data, host responses, certificates, registration records, and curated OSINT context.

Infrastructure clustering and reuse

Threat actors often reuse infrastructure components across campaigns.

Validin allows teams to identify clustering through shared DNS resolution, certificate reuse, hosting overlap, and common response characteristics. These relationships help group related assets even when individual indicators appear unrelated.

Infrastructure reuse patterns are preserved historically, allowing profiles to remain accurate as assets rotate.

Pattern analysis

Threat actor activity often follows identifiable timelines.

Validin’s historical datasets allow teams to review when infrastructure first appeared, how long it remained active, and how it changed across campaigns. DNS updates, certificate issuance, and registration changes can be reviewed together to understand operational cadence.

This allows security teams to differentiate between one-off activity and sustained operations.

Behavioural characteristics

Host response data provides insight into how threat actor infrastructure behaves when accessed.

Teams use response headers, content structure, redirects, favicons, and TLS characteristics in Validin to identify consistent behaviour across multiple assets. Similar responses can indicate shared tooling and common deployment methods.

Registration and ownership signals

Registration data supports profiling by exposing how domains are acquired and managed.

Validin allows teams to review registrar usage, registration timing, and normalized contact roles across multiple domains. Consistent registration patterns can strengthen attribution and support grouping of infrastructure.

Historical registration changes also help track shifts in operational approach.

Certificate-based relationships

Certificates are frequently reused across threat infrastructure.

Validin’s Certificate Transparency data identifies shared certificates, SAN overlap, and issuance timing across domains. Certificate relationships often reveal infrastructure connections that are not visible through DNS alone.

OSINT alignment and naming

Validin integrates selected open source intelligence to provide external context for profiling.

Threat profiles, public research references, and framework mappings allow teams to align internally observed infrastructure with named threat actors or campaigns. Sources and references are visible, supporting review and validation.

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Note

OSINT context supports naming and alignment but does not replace infrastructure-based profiling.

Maintaining threat profiles over time

Threat actor profiles are not static. Validin allows teams to monitor changes to profiled infrastructure, including new assets, decommissioned domains, or behavioural shifts. Historical data ensures profiles remain relevant and useable even as activity evolves.

Use of Projects for profiling

Teams commonly use Validin's Projects feature to manage threat actor profiles.

Projects allow teams to group related infrastructure together, document observations, attach references, and track changes over time. This provides continuity across investigations and supports collaboration between analysts.

Supporting downstream use cases

Threat actor profiling in Validin can be used to support:

• Incident triage and escalation decisions
• Threat hunting and detection development
• Intelligence reporting and sharing

Profiles are based on observed infrastructure and documented context rather than assumptions.

What Validin provides for threat actor profiling