According to the present scenario, many organizations has access to timely and accurate threat intelligence in their core security operations. It is observed that the security teams are blessed with easy availability of data and intelligence feeds to choose from. However, the most formidable challenge comes when you have to select the right information from a myriad of sources and converting them into action, which can probably be a curse.
It becomes necessary to maintain a balance between collecting enough information to be comprehensive, and at the same time focusing on the relevancy of information to your business environment and infrastructure. Superfluous or too much data will overload security analysts, as they waste time sifting through large amounts of unnecessary information. On the other hand, little information could dire consequences if something significant is missing.
What is Threat Intelligence?
Threat intelligence refers to the data that is collected, processed, and analyzed to get an understanding of how the threat actors motives, targets, and attack behaviors. Threat intelligence helps to make faster, more informed, data-backed security decisions and change their behavior from reactive to proactive in the fight against threat actors. It is generally an evidenced-based knowledge, which includes context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and action-based advice, about emerging hazards to assets.
Importance of Threat Intelligence
In the digital age, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and defenders are repeatedly trying to outmaneuver each other. The importance of data of threats actor's next move becomes crucial to design your defenses and predict similar future attacks.
The value of threat intelligence is felt by every business, where they focus on their efforts on only the most basic use cases, such as integrating threat data feeds with existing network, IPS, firewalls and SIEMs, without taking full advantage of the insights that can be offered by intelligence.
Threat intelligence is important for the following reasons:
- It sheds light on the unknown facts which enables the security teams to make better decisions.
- It assists security professionals to get a better understanding of threat actor's decision-making process.
- It empowers cyber security stakeholders by revealing adversarial motives and their techniques and procedures.
- It empowers the business stakeholders including executive boards, CISOs, CIOs and CTOs, to invest wisely, mitigate risk, become more efficient and make quick decisions.
Data Crunching Drudgery
The benefit of data assimilation and enablement welcomes time savings. The automated platforms can process large amount of data in a short span of time and more accurately than employees doing it manually.
The security teams gather vast amounts of threat intelligence from multiple places in different and incompatible formats. It is a laborious work the analysts to correlate such huge data. The probability of mistakes is more, especially when ender pressure to meet remediation timelines.
This automation takes the drudgery out of importing data from an extensive range of sources, such as internal logs, open-source feeds, and threat intelligence feeds. A threat intelligence platform (TIP) normalizes the data and enriches it with additional context, then correlates and converts it into a standard format.
Apart from saving time and avoiding errors, standardization brings several other benefits such as enabling easy integration of data into an existing, enterprise-wide security infrastructure and tools.
Broad Area of Intelligence Sharing
Due to automation, intelligence can be shared efficiently throughout entire organization, removing silos and allowing access to the most updated data. This assists to turn unrelated pieces of threat data and knowledge, distributed among different departments and locations into actionable insights. Putting together, the joined-up threat intelligence capabilities can be increased rapidly to meet growth or encompass mergers and acquisitions and address new vulnerabilities and forms of cyberattack.
In earlier period, the lack of access to security information has often stymied the together understanding of threats to the detriment of overall security. With collaboration, individuals can out their heads together to devise and share the most effective defensive steps.
Focus on the Priorities
We encounter a good amount of assimilation of relevant data from internal and external sources, which enables the security teams to assess the severity and relevance of threats as per their own internal predefined conditions.
Instead of getting distracted by redundant and irrelevant IOCs, the security analysts can concentrate on the most significant and immediate remediation. Automation, itself, does the hard work, process and prioritize data to enable the security teams to set out parameters, which are in accordance of their organization's security posture, compliance obligations and internal governance standards.
This, in turn, brings consistency to the process, quickly differentiates the important ones and help to reduce the time to detect and respond to dangerous threats. This also highlights the areas where security practices need improvement and where additional resources should be allocated to help security budgeting and planning.
Aim of Threat Driven Enterprise
Cyber security has become a global challenge and hence, critical threat intelligence shall not be limited within organizations, which gives the threat actors liberty to carry out further attacks using similar techniques. The take up of TIPs, with bi-directional feedback, would support the positive trend towards a more dynamic and collaborative attempt to criminal activity. This enhances the ability of every security team to pre-emptively counteract cyber threats before they cause damage.
The threat intelligence platform (TIP) have the capability to provide intelligence, which is highly relevant to an organization's particular industry, threat landscape, and operational context, enabling precise threat detection and response. Once, everyone is prepared to take the next step of moving forward and sharing lessons learned with like-minded communities, the collective defenses of all the participation will be strengthened.
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