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Build Your Own Cyber Threat Intelligence Program

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber Threat Intelligence is the enriched and aggregated knowledge of the cyber threats extracted by collecting, processing, and analyzing the data to understand and assess malicious threat actors’ motives, intent, targets, and attack behaviors. Threat intelligence helps us make better-informed security decisions and allows us to adopt proactive steps against cyber threats instead of reactive ones.

“Threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications, and action-oriented advice about existing or emerging menaces or hazards to assets that can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject’s response to that menace or hazard”. – Gartner

According to Global cyber threat intelligence (CTI) market size 2020-2023, published by Statista, “In 2023, the global cyber threat intelligence market (CTI) is expected to amount to approximately 981 million U.S. dollars.”

How Cyber Threat Intelligence Enhance Your Security Operations?

Organizations can make quick, data-driven, real-time security decisions by addressing cyberattacks through threat intelligence. Having this level of advanced knowledge allows the security team to make preventative changes before the threat of an attack reaches the threshold of an organization. This creates a custom barrier that is specifically aimed at the suspected attacker.

Security professionals need to outmaneuver advanced persistent threats (APTs) constantly. You need data on threat actors ‘ next moves to tailor your defenses and pre-empt future attacks proactively. Using threat intelligence helps all types of organizations better understand their attackers, respond faster to incidents, and anticipate threats in advance. This data helps small businesses achieve a level of protection otherwise unavailable. Additionally, enterprises with large security teams can leverage external threat intelligence and make their analysts more effective by leveraging the costs and skills of their analysts.

The majority of organizations today focus on the most basic use cases, such as integrating threat data feeds with existing networks, IPS, firewalls, and SIEMs – without leveraging most of the insights that intelligence can provide.

Following are some of the key benefits of building your own cyber threat intelligence program:

  • Provides insight into the unknown threats, enabling security teams to make better decisions
  • Informs cyber security stakeholders about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) of adversaries
  • Provides insight into the threat actor’s decision-making process
  • Helps the company’s board of directors, CISO, CIO, and CTO invest wisely, mitigate risk, be more efficient, and make better decisions.

Types of Cyber Threat Intelligence

Strategic:

A strategic cyber threat intelligence program focuses on understanding high-level trends and adversarial motives and leveraging that knowledge to advance security and decision-making strategies. In strategic threat intelligence, a wide range of factors are analyzed for their influences on an organization’s threat landscape, and the information is used to fine-tune the organization’s cybersecurity strategy. A strategic threat intelligence program’s purpose is to identify vulnerabilities and risks an organization faces and to determine what threat actors might cause the greatest damage. In addition to determining high-level patterns, targets, events, cyber trends, and geopolitical factors, it allows for determining how an organization’s threat landscape may change over time. Intelligence on a strategic level is a complex task involving a large amount of data, often in multiple languages, that must be processed into usable information.

Operational:

Operational threat intelligence focuses on understanding the threat actors’ capabilities and TTPS and consists of building profiles of threat actors by gathering knowledge about cyberattacks, threat actors, campaigns, and/or events, with a focus on answering five w’s: who, what, when, where, and why. In order to predict their future actions, these profiles give a comprehensive analysis of their involvement, motives, and past attacks. Cybersecurity professionals responsible for daily operations benefit greatly from operational threat intelligence. Through threat monitoring and incident response, professionals can better understand what to look for and what to do when they find suspicious activities

Tactical:

The objective of tactical threat intelligence is to formulate the tactics, techniques and procedures of cyber threat actors. This information helps security professionals improve their defenses against potential attacks and can be used to identify attack vectors.

Additionally, tactical threat intelligence considers any preferred vulnerabilities and common infrastructure used by threat actors. Using tactical threat intelligence, you can find out what your adversary is planning and prepare with appropriate security controls and solutions, particularly if you find out how they are avoiding or delaying detection. By using this information, you will be able to improve the existing security strategy and improve incident management and response.

Threat Intelligence Life Cycle

Threat Intelligence Life Cyber consists of 5 phases:

  • Planning
  • Collection
  • Processing
  • Analysis
  • Dissemination

Threat Intelligence Use Cases:

Following are some of the use cases of cyber threat intelligence in cyber security:

  • Vulnerability Management
  • Security Operations
  • Incident Response
  • Risk Management
  • Fraud Prevention
  • Leadership Visibility
  • Detection Coverage
  • Threat Monitoring
  • Actor Profiling
  • Campaign Tracking
  • Threat Research
  • Malware Analysis

Strategy to Build Your Own Cyber Threat Intelligence Program

You can build your own cyber threat intelligence program by implementing the below steps:

  • Identify Your Threat Landscape
  • Decide on the Type of Your Threat Intelligence Program
  • Identify Threat Intel Feeds & Sources
  • Determine Threat Intelligence Tools for Your Arsenal
  • Hire and Train the Right People
  • Define SOPs, SLA, KRI, and KPIs for Threat Intel Operations
  • Determine Threat Intelligence Dissipation Strategy
  • Keep Sprinting
  • Leverage Threat Intelligence Solutions

Let NetSecurity Help You Build Your Threat Intelligence Program

In order to automate the process of collecting and processing threat intelligence, security professionals and analysts can often gain a great deal from using threat intelligence solutions and services that can automate the collection and processing of data; it can then be used to create intelligence reports, deploying and sharing the Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), allowing them to focus more on the application and use of that threat intelligence to enhance security operations. ThreatResponder, NetSecurity’s intelligence-driven EDR solution, allows organizations to consume intelligence, take action, and maximize their intelligence investment. Using ThreatResponder, you can automate the threat investigation process and get actionable intelligence and custom IOCs specifically tailored to the threats encountered on your endpoints.

Want to try our ThreatResponder, cutting-edge Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) security solution in action? Click on the below button to request a free demo of our NetSecurity’s ThreatResponder platform.

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