AttackSeqBench: Benchmarking the Capabilities of LLMs for Attack Sequences Understanding

Abstract

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports document observations of cyber threats, synthesizing evidence about adversaries' actions and intent into actionable knowledge that informs detection, response, and defense planning. However, the unstructured and verbose nature of CTI reports poses significant challenges for security practitioners to manually extract and analyze such sequences. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit promise in cybersecurity tasks such as entity extraction and knowledge graph construction, their understanding and reasoning capabilities towards behavioral sequences remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce AttackSeqBench, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs' reasoning abilities across the tactical, technical, and procedural dimensions of adversarial behaviors, while satisfying Extensibility, Reasoning Scalability, and Domain-dpecific Epistemic Expandability. We further benchmark 7 LLMs, 5 LRMs and 4 post-training strategies across 3 benchmark settings and 3 benchmark tasks within our AttackSeqBench to identify their advantages and limitations in such specific domain. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of LLM-driven CTI report understanding and foster its application in cybersecurity operations. Our code of benchmark construction and evaluation and the corresponding dataset are available at: https://github.com/hulkima/AttackSeqBench.