What Is Cyberthreat Intelligence?

• Cyberthreat Intelligence Definition

  Cyberthreat Intelligence Definition

  Cyberthreat intelligence is the most up-to-date information, context, and indicator of cyber threats and actors. It helps to stay abreast of vulnerabilities, threats, and threat actors; and subsequently, orchestrate automated security responses in an organization’s digital landscape to mitigate associated cybersecurity risks.
• How does cyberthreat intelligence work?

  How does cyberthreat intelligence work?

  Cyberthreat intelligence itself cannot prevent attacks or mitigate intrusions. However, it’s critical to integrate cyberthreat intelligence into an organization’s cybersecurity strategy and strengthen operations. This helps the organization to proactively improve security posture against possible attacks in the future and prevent data leaks after detecting an attack or intrusion.

  The threat intelligence lifecycle depends on how an organization gathers and integrates threat intelligence into its implementation strategy.

  There are two primary options to obtain cybersecurity threat intelligence.

  Open-source intelligence (OSINT): Typically, cyberthreat analysts gather threat-related data from various publicly available sources including, security forums, threat repositories, and security news, among others. They analyze the collected data to extract or create actionable threat information and identify the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) threat actors employ.

  This method of synthesizing cyberthreat intelligence requires considerable investments in analysis processes and often creating a dedicated team of expert threat intelligence analysts.

  Timely analysis of gathering and analyzing threat data is crucial. In some cases, however, threat data might not become available in a timely manner in the public sources, which could lead to delayed analysis and can result in an inability to mitigate or prevent potential security breaches. On the other hand, a flood of new threat data could overwhelm the analysis process and lead to delayed access to threat intelligence.

  Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS): A COTS solution is a commercial threat intelligence feed offered by a third-party cybersecurity vendor. In other words, the vendor collects, analyzes, and tracks threat data from various proprietary and public sources to synthesize threat intelligence. Then, the vendor relays this threat intelligence in the form of a feed to its commercial partners and customers.

  An organization can integrate such a feed into its automated security systems to identify intrusions and orchestrate responses. Security analysts and leaders of the organization can further use this knowledge to assess their current cybersecurity posture, strengthen defense mechanisms, and possibly mitigate an ongoing attack early on to limit damages and legal liabilities arising from such a scenario.

  A COFT solution is attractive for an organization that doesn’t want to invest in a threat intelligence analysis team or want to rely on a reliable, tested, and well-maintained threat intelligence feed.

  Besides, some COFT solution vendors natively integrate their threat intelligence feeds into their other offerings or third-party products such as a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution to help organizations simplify deployment and security operations.
• What is a cyberthreat intelligence analyst?

  What is a cyberthreat intelligence analyst?

  A cyberthreat intelligence analyst is a cybersecurity professional who specializes in:

  • Analyzing threats
  • Identifying actionable insights from threat data
  • Investigating security events, intrusions, attacks, and breaches
  • Understanding and communicating critical information from threat intelligence feeds
  • Preparing threat intelligence reports
  • Various cybersecurity methodologies, tools, and strategies

  Cyberthreat intelligence analysts play a critical role in an organization’s security operations, identifying vulnerabilities and strategizing responses to potential cyberattacks and threat actors.
• Benefits of cyberthreat intelligence

  Benefits of cyberthreat intelligence

  Cyberthreat intelligence offers numerous benefits in terms of reduced threat risk, improved threat analysis, enhanced incident response, and efficient security operations, among others.

  Reduced threat risk: Cybercriminals continuously harness new techniques and procedures to attack and breach organizational IT systems with various motives. As new and previously unknown threats emerge, threat intelligence delivers essential knowledge about threats and threat actors. This helps cybersecurity teams to prepare entirely new or strengthen defense mechanisms based on threat intelligence. This can significantly reduce threat risk and improve organizational preparedness.

  Extensive threat analysis: In addition to delivering important information about threats, threat intelligence offers more profound insights into threat evolution, what type of threat actors are using them, and what resources and technologies an attack requires. This enriched knowledge helps cybersecurity analysts to stay updated about threats like zero-day exploits early on and understand any technical know-how or skill gaps in preparing defense mechanisms.

  Prioritized patch management: An organization’s IT environment consists of hundreds of hardware and software components, in addition to third-party cloud and networking services. Since an organization’s cybersecurity team would have limited personnel and time to patch vulnerabilities, threat intelligence helps prioritize vulnerabilities to patch based on risk, exploitation frequency, and severity of vulnerabilities. With this approach, cybersecurity personnel can proactively reduce risk by prioritizing critical and time-sensitive patches and addressing non-critical patches with a low priority.

  Improved incident response: While cybersecurity and intrusion detection systems actively monitor various types of user and network activity, they could produce false positives that can overwhelm cybersecurity analysts and lead to resource wastage. Integrating threat intelligence into these systems helps to add context to various types of activity patterns in real time. Besides, such mechanisms can use alert risk scoring to help analysts prioritize which alerts require their attention. This helps to quickly identify any attempts to intrude into a system and timely strategize a response to suppress the attacks.

  For example, the threat intelligence identifies an ongoing DDoS on IT systems of an organization in a particular industry vertical and flags malicious traffic originating IP addresses. Using this information, an organization in the same industry vertical can blacklist those IP addresses to prevent the possibility of a successful DDoS attack on its business-critical IT systems.

  Mitigating risk: An organization typically has the responsibility to handle various types of sensitive user data—such as health records, payment data, user activity data, etc.—and proprietary business data—such as patent data and market intelligence. In some industries, organizations are responsible for complying with various regulatory frameworks, including HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, among others.

  Accordingly, a data breach could subject an organization to severe legal liabilities and expensive settlements, in addition to a damaged reputation and customer turnover.

  By leveraging threat intelligence, an organization can stay ahead of threats and threat actors to maintain compliance and data security. In turn, this helps to minimize business and financial risks related to breaches and reduce operational expenditure.

  Fraud Prevention: Cybercriminals usually sell data records obtained from illegal data breaches in the black markets in the dark web, such as user credentials, credit card numbers, and email addresses, among others. Malicious actors acquire this data and most often use it for financial gain through techniques like credential stuffing, business email compromise, and account takeover attacks. Threat intelligence can identify such types of illegal data circulation in black markets and help prepare an organization to safeguard user interests.

  For example, security analysts can implement strategies to disallow login attempts from previously unknown IP addresses or geo-locations and require additional layers of authentication. Or they could increase the sensitivity of spear-phishing filters for the email accounts of senior executives to mitigate the risk of compromise. In addition, threat intelligence can also deliver critical information about typo squatting in real time, so an organization can issue security warnings to users.
• Types of threat intelligence

  Types of threat intelligence

  There are primarily four types of threat intelligence:

  1. Strategic: It focuses on providing knowledge in the form of non-technical and high-level overviews to help senior executives understand the organizational threat landscape, including:
     • High-level patterns in targets and techniques
     • Risk exposure of different lines of business
     • Overall trends in the cybersecurity landscape

     This information is often compiled in the form of reports, whitepapers, and executive briefings.

  2. Tactical: It gives insights into specific tactics, technologies, and attack methods threat actors use. It also includes in-depth technical information and offers contextual insights. Cybersecurity professionals use this knowledge to prepare and deploy defense mechanisms to strengthen an organization’s security posture.
  3. Technical: It synthesizes intelligence from threat data feeds and offers insights into specific threat patterns. For example, subject lines involved in spear-phishing emails, specific vulnerabilities targeted, malware software leveraged, and exploit techniques used. Since cybercriminals continuously change these tactics and tools, analysts should expeditiously use technical threat intelligence and acquire updated information in relatively shorter spans of time.
  4. Operational: This type of intelligence helps in understanding ongoing cyberattacks and campaigns. It offers tailored information to help prepare and responds to incidents and aids in identifying the motives, nature, and time interval of specific attacks. Gathering this type of intelligence requires infiltrating criminal hacker groups and forums to collect critical threat data.
• What are threat intelligence tools?

  What are threat intelligence tools?

  Threat intelligence tools help to gather raw data, synthesize threat intelligence, apply rules-based or pattern-based monitoring techniques to flag suspicious activity, send alerts about incidents, and simplify compliance. These tools often work with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions to provide comprehensive cybersecurity management capabilities.

  An ideal threat intelligence and SIEM solution should:

  • Offer a native threat intelligence feed or integrate with third-party vendor feeds
  • Streamline event log collection and data normalization
  • Analyze and correlate events in real time to generate alerts
  • Verify file integrity across the IT infrastructure of an organization
  • Help improve productivity and effectiveness by automating threat detection and incident response
  • Simplify compliance and auditing by integrating with reporting tools
  • Justify the licensing, procurement, or operational costs for the cybersecurity value being provided