The increased frequency of cyber threats is not an easy problem to deal with. However, this necessitates the organisations to be strict against these threats, as attackers can ruin their whole ecosystem of networks if they are sophisticated. Preparing the right strategy and utilising cyber threat intelligence could hinder the attack possibilities. This article further explains what threat intelligence is, its importance and the life cycle in order to help you create a secure network environment.
What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?
The name justifies the knowledge or information about the cyber threats that can be termed as Cyber Threat Intelligence. This understanding further helps the organisations to identify the mechanism of an attack, how harmful the attack is for the business and the course of action to defend it.
A few common cyber attacks, such as man-in-the-middle, denial of service, phishing etc., could be really dangerous for organisations. Thus, threat intelligence guides cyber security professionals about the new threats in order to protect systems. Cyber threat intelligence tools in the market could be the main source of information gathering, analysing and responding to attacks.
Benefits of Threat Intelligence
No doubt, threat intelligence is the security solution that benefits organisations in multiple ways. Below are a few value-adding points to halt security compromises.
- Risk Mitigation : Although cybercriminals are always ready to poke into the systems with new malware, cyber threat intelligence helps security experts to get alerts for the same. Therefore, it can reduce the risk of data loss and any hamper in daily operations.
- Avoid Unauthorised Access : Suspicious IP addresses trying to get any information from your systems could be easily detected and avoided with the help of cyber threat intelligence. Hackers could result in driving a Distributed Denial of Service attack if cyber experts do not use an effective CTI tool. Thus, a good CTI is efficient enough to block all unknown IP addresses.
- Cost Reduction : While threat intelligence helps to reduce data breaches, it results in cutting the costs of legal complaints and procedures.
Types of Cyber Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence has majorly four types, explained below.
- Strategic Threat Intelligence : Strategic Intelligence majorly focuses on the non-technical knowledge of the threats for everyone in the organisation to understand. This clear information includes the threats in trend and what can be done to prevent them. Moreover, it comprises the geopolitical situations, the threat landscape in a particular industry, and the impact of the trending threats to the organisation. The strategic level helps the non-technical decision-makers prepare the strategy for coping with different types of industry threats.
- Tactical Threat Intelligence : Tactical threat intelligence provides high-security professionals with comprehensive information related to the Tactics, Techniques and Procedures used by an attacker. Moreover, it can help avoid attacks using known indicators, technical information and the objective of the cyber criminals. It also includes the involvement of third-party information, including white papers and other security-related technical documents. These resources come up with the info on malware, malicious IP addresses, domains etc.
- Technical Threat Intelligence : Technical Threat Intelligence encompasses all the resources, commands, tools etc., that attackers use to perform malicious activities, and it mainly focuses on IoC. This intelligence comprises the information gathered by investigating the cyber attacks already performed on other organisations. As a result of this, info collected could help professionals to identify attacks early, and they can incorporate firewalls and endpoints for security to the systems in the eye of the attacker.
- Operational Threat Intelligence : This threat intelligence is the process at the operational level, and information is collected from real-world resources such as humans, social media etc. It contains the data, including the nature and time of the attacks, potential and the attacker's intentions. This information is generally for higher security experts like security managers, executives and more. Hence, it can benefit the organisation to stay alert for future threats.
Cyber Threat Intelligence - Life cycle
From gathering the threat information to reacting against them, threat intelligence is a long process. So, how does the life cycle of cyber threat intelligence go on? Below are the six steps of the cycle explained.
- Direction : This phase determines the direction and the planning of the threat intelligence, such as requirements, priority, and timeline of development. The overall strategy is prepared for the whole lifecycle, from collecting data to the integration of intelligence for consumers.
- Collection : Secondly, the experts need to collect the data from different sources, be it humans, technology or any other. However, dark web forums could be a good source of information. Various third parties, online news & blogs, security websites, and IoCs could contain the relevant data of your need. After the collection, the cycle goes to the next step of processing this raw information.
- Processing : In this step, raw data is processed and sent to the next stage of analysis. Basically, high-security professionals convert the raw data into useful and easily understandable information so that consumers can have a clear picture before analysing it. This process of decrypting, parsing, filtering, and structuring data is performed by using automated high technology and tools.
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Analysis : This is the most important step of the threat intelligence lifecycle for analysing the shortcomings while making pragmatic decisions. The analysis includes:
- The loss the threat can pose to the organisation.
- The assets that are at higher risk.
- Steps that should be taken to improve security.
- Dissemination : Threat intelligence reports, indicators, security alerts and tools are a few of the analysed information that is forwarded to the consumers. All this collected information goes to the different professionals of different levels so that they can further take actionable security decisions.
- Feedback and Improvement : The last stage is for feedback from the consumers and improvement scopes. Threat intelligence reports are sent to the consumers to verify if they are meeting the security requirements or not. They provide feedback which in turn helps to improvise the information while producing the most relevant and accurate threat intelligence.
All in all, an adequate knowledge about cyber threats including where they are emerging from, collecting and processing data for better analysis, and finally resolving these security breaches is really important for your organisation. The entire intelligence report prepared throughout the life-cycle comprises the most valuable information that could be beneficial to say no to future threats as well. This is how threat intelligence works offering higher security to your network ecosystem.
Secninjaz Technologies LLP offers you the Cyber Threat Intelligence that takes care of your organisation’s security while providing you the high-quality intelligence report. Our experts make sure that you get up-to-date information about cyber threats resisting them before they affect your business.
