The Power of Cyber Threat Intelligence in Today's Security Landscape

Your company may have best-of-breed security solutions by today’s standard, but it may not necessarily be enough to stop the thousands of new and emerging threats introduced every day. To maintain a strong security posture in today’s threat landscape, you need a way to proactively detect new threats so that you can create strategies to stop them. Cyber threat intelligence collects data from the clearnet internet and darknet onion sites, analyzes it, and provides insights for you or your security team to take action. It is the most effective way for your business to stay ahead of cyber threats and reduce the risk of becoming a target for the next newsworthy data breach.

What are the Benefits of Threat Intelligence?

Before you can protect yourself from the latest threats, you need to know as much about them as possible. Only then can you build a strategy to detect, mitigate, contain, and eradicate them. As you build a cybersecurity infrastructure capable of stopping them, cyber-criminals will refactor their code and utilize malware and other angles of attack to bypass your newly developed defenses. It is a constant game of cat-and-mouse where the cycle continues until a threat actor either gives up or successfully gains access to your network. Rest assured that if one threat actor quits, another one takes his place, so constantly monitoring the cybersecurity landscape is paramount to your business continuity.

Every day, over 450,000 new threats are detected¹. Bear in mind, this number only reflects those threats that are openly detected and does not account for those which go undetected, so the number is conceivably higher. Your current security controls might handle a majority of these threats, but even one sophisticated novel threat could cost you millions.

There are countless examples of emerging threats affecting corporations and government agencies across the globe that can be used to highlight the importance of threat intelligence. WannaCry is one such example where over 300,000 computers in over 150 countries were infected with new ransomware within only a few hours. Businesses affected by the newly released ransomware suffered data loss and downtime, and many of them were unproductive for days after the attack. Total global damages were reported to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Cyber threat intelligence is your countermeasure against emerging malware, ransomware, and vulnerabilities. It is an added layer of security that can strengthen your current policies and procedures. Threat intelligence can offer a variety of different benefits to all levels of your organization, but a few primary groups benefiting from this information include:

• Security staff or analysts: Improve proactive countermeasures and defenses for your organization by knowing newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting environment software and hardware.
• Security Operations Center (SOC): Monitoring for emerging threats becomes more effective when SOC analysts are prepared and know the telltale signs of new threats.
• Incident response teams: More quickly contain and eradicate threats when you know their footprint, exploit potential, and payloads.
• Executives or business managers: Know when your organizational data has been exposed and if your organization could be the target of the next attack.

How Does Cyber Threat Intelligence Work?

Threat intelligence is a continual process, so it has a repeatable lifecycle. Because the cybersecurity landscape changes each day, data is constantly being collected and analyzed. Whether you have an in-house threat intelligence team or you work with a consultant, the lifecycle is generally the same. Your team might have a slightly different approach, but threat intelligence is carried out using the following lifecycle:

• Scoping: The threat intelligence team needs to understand your business, what you do, and your attack surface. Collected information is then used to define a scope, which will define the type of analysis and data necessary to provide an action plan for stakeholders.
• Data collection: After scope and attack surface are defined, data is collected from various clearnet and darknet sources. Threat analysts have tools to scan sources and collect data. Data is collected from numerous sources including social media, darknet markets, forums, publicly available downloads, and information from other threat intelligence agencies.
• Data processing: The tools used to collect data are also usually coded to process it. Raw data must be parsed, decrypted, translated, and “cleaned” so that it can be used in analysis.
• Analysis: Analytics tools take the “clean” data after processing and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine patterns, insights, possible projected outcomes, and any common trends that analysts should address and use for further review.
• Dissemination: Before stakeholders take action, they need to understand threats and the risk of them becoming a compromise. In the dissemination phase, threat intelligence analysts deliver reports to executives and managers and explain trends that should then define the organization’s plan of action.
• Feedback: After stakeholders read analytics reports, feedback determines the next step in how the organization will deal with emerging threats. It might mean new infrastructure, a change in security policies, or updates to configurations.

Types of Threat Intelligence

Your organization can leverage the three types of threat intelligence, but most organizations will stick with strategic threat intelligence unless you have a security team or SOC on-site. Consultants might use several strategy types to support their customers, which inevitably makes cyber threat intelligence more effective.

The three types of cyber threat intelligence are as follows:

• Tactical: Researchers and analysts have a sandbox environment where they will decompile and dissect malware and other threats to understand the way that they work. This work is critical for other security professionals to build strategies to stop new threats and for software developers to patch their applications from any vulnerabilities. Tactical researchers are interested in the way malware works and the technical nature of threats.
• Operational: Honeypots can be used to attract threat actors where researchers can log their activities and understand their strategies. By studying threat activity, researchers can better understand their motives and operational strategies once a vulnerability is exploited. The data collected from this activity can be used to create incident response, threat detection, and vulnerability management. Operational threat intelligence identifies motives behind attacks and goals during a compromise.
• Strategic: Security staff and researchers must stay knowledgeable with the latest trends and insights so that they can patch vulnerabilities, change configurations, or be aware of threat actors active in sophisticated attacks. Strategic threat intelligence helps organizations better understand the current cybersecurity landscape and the risks associated with emerging threats.

How Access Point Can Help

Every week, Access Point releases a cybersecurity briefing called CyberWatch to alert you on the latest threats, trends in cybersecurity, and the threats that you should be aware of as a business. If you do not currently leverage cyber threat intelligence, these weekly briefings can be a helpful introduction to threatscape analysis. Should you wish to take threat intelligence more seriously as a security practice, you can schedule a call to meet with one of our experts to find out how we can help you stop threats before they result in a critical data breach against your organization.

Sources

¹ https://www.av-test.org/en/statistics/malware/#:~:text=Every%20day%2C%20the%20AV%2DTEST,potentially%20unwanted%20applications%20(PUA)