Cyber Threat Intelligence: A Handbook

Cyber Threat Intelligence: Threat intelligence is the collection, processing, and analysis of data to determine the objectives, targets, and attack strategies of a threat actor. By facilitating faster and data-driven security decision-making, top cyber risk intelligence businesses enable customers to respond to threat actors less reactively and more proactively.

Reducing an organization’s attack surface is one of the most crucial steps it can take to lower its exposure to cyber risk. An attacker can enter a system or network through a multitude of different places, which is known as the attack surface.

It will be easier for an attacker to enter if there are more entry points. Having relevant and reliable information on these suppliers is crucial to a security programme, as third-party partnerships can make up a significant portion of an organization’s attack surface.

Cyber Threat Intelligence: What Is It?

In the field of cyber security, attackers and defences are always in competition. To proactively configure your reasons and prevent assaults in the future, you need to know what a threat actor’s next move is.

Companies are starting to realize how valuable the top cyber risk intelligence firms are, and 72% of them want to boost their threat intelligence budget in the following quarters.

Receiving value and appreciating value, however, are two different things. Most organizations are presently focusing their efforts only on the most basic use cases, such as merging threat data feeds with already-existing networks, IPS, firewalls, and SIEMs, without entirely using the insights that intelligence may bring.

Companies that utilize threat intelligence below this basic level are taking advantage of chances to strengthen their security postures significantly.

Threat intelligence is essential for the reasons listed below.

Reveals the unknown, enabling security professionals to make better-educated judgements.
Increases the power of cyber security users by disclosing the opposition’s goals and their tactics, techniques, and practices (TTPs).
It helps security experts comprehend the motivations of threat actors, enabling business organizations, such as executive boards, CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs, to spend wisely, reduce risk, be more successful, and make decisions faster.

Who Does Threat Intelligence Affect?

Threat intelligence can process threat data to help organizations of all sizes better understand their adversaries, react to crises faster, and predict the next move of threat actors.

SMBs may now obtain security that would otherwise be unavailable thanks to this information. Conversely, companies with large security teams might use external threat intelligence to reduce expenses and requirements while increasing analyst productivity.

Every team’s security member benefits from threat intelligence in a number of unique ways, such as:

• Top Level Administration

Acknowledge the dangers that the business faces and the options available to mitigate their effects.

• Sec/IT Analyst

Boost defences by enhancing detection and prevention skills.

• SOC

Sort occurrences according to importance to the organization and level of risk.

• CSIRT

Accelerate the process of prioritizing, managing incidents, and conducting investigations.

• Intelligence Analyst

Track down and pursue threat actors that are seeking the company.

In summary

AI cannot generate operational threat intelligence on its own. The data has to be human-analyzed and formatted so that customers may easily use it. Although operational intelligence requires more resources than tactical intelligence, it is more durable since adversaries cannot quickly change their TTPs like they can with tools like malware or specialized equipment.

Operational intelligence would be most beneficial to cybersecurity specialists who work in security operations centres (SOCs) and are in charge of day-to-day operations.

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