kamran sharief Cyber Threat Intelligence: Data that is gathered, processed, and analyzed to identify the goals, targets, and attack tactics of a threat actor is known as threat intelligence. Best cyber risk intelligence companies empower to behave less reactively and more proactively in the face of threat actors by enabling users to make security judgments more quickly and based on data.
One of the most important actions an organization can take to lessen its exposure to cyber risk is reducing its attack surface. The attack surface refers to the quantity and variety of possible entry points into a system or network for an attacker.
The presence of more access points will make it simpler for an attacker to enter. Because third-party partnerships can account for a sizable fraction of an organization’s attack surface, having useful and trustworthy data about these vendors is essential to a security programme.
What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?
Defenders and Advanced persistent threats (APTs) compete with one another all the time in cyber security. Information on a threat actor’s next step is important for proactively configuring your defenses and averting attacks in the future.
Businesses are becoming more and more aware of the value of the best cyber risk intelligence companies; in the upcoming quarters, 72% plan to increase their spending on threat intelligence.
However, receiving value and recognizing value are not the same. Without fully utilizing the insights that intelligence may provide, the majority of organizations are now concentrating their efforts mainly on the most fundamental use cases, such as combining threat data feeds with pre-existing networks, IPS, firewalls, and SIEMs.
Businesses who limit their use of threat intelligence to this elementary level are losing out on opportunities that may greatly improve their security postures.
The following outlines why threat intelligence is crucial.:
- Allows security professionals to make more informed decisions by revealing the unknown.
- Gives cyber security users more power by exposing the objectives of the opposition and their strategies, methods, and practises (TTPs)
- Enables business organizations, like executive boards, CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs, to invest intelligently, to lower the risk, to be more effective, to make decisions more quickly by assisting security professionals in understanding the thought process of threat actors.
Who is Affected by Threat Intelligence?
Threat data can be processed by threat intelligence to enable organizations from big to small to understand better about their attackers, to respond to crises more quickly, and foresee a threat actor’s next move.
This information gives SMBs access to security that would be inaccessible. On the other side, businesses with big security teams can increase the productivity of their analysts while cutting costs and requirements by utilizing external threat intelligence.
Threat intelligence benefits of security member of every team in a variety of special ways, including:
- Executive Management
Recognize the risks the company confronts and the choices available to address their impact.
- Sec/IT Analyst
Strengthen defenses by improving preventive and detection capabilities
- SOC
Prioritize incidents based on their risk and organizational impact
- CSIRT
Increase the speed of incident management, investigation, and prioritizing.
- Intel Analyst
Find and follow threat actors who are after the organization.
Conclusion
Operational threat intelligence cannot be produced by machines alone. Data must be translated through human analysis into a format that clients can use with ease. Operational intelligence is more resource-intensive than tactical intelligence, but it has a longer shelf life because adversaries can’t alter their TTPs as quickly as they can their tools, such a particular kind of infrastructure or malware.
The cybersecurity experts who operate in a SOC (security operations center) and are in charge of carrying out daily operations would benefit the most from operational intelligence.