Posted
Cybersecurity technology, processes, and tradecraft are constantly evolving as the attack surface, and vectors expand. It’s no secret that threats are growing faster than defenders can combat them. Organizations often create specialized teams with a specific mandate, such as incident response and threat hunting, which become siloed. This impacts their ability to share valuable threat intelligence they’ve collected with the rest of the security team. Also, as more security technologies are added to this mix – with the average organization having 76 security tools1 – making effective use of high-fidelity threat intelligence is critical.
Organizations that want to infuse threat intelligence into cyber defense operations, offensive security, and incident response activities to gain efficiencies, enhance effectiveness and increase collaboration should consider implementing a cyber fusion operations model. At ThreatConnect, we call this Intelligence-Powered Security Operations.
The cyber fusion operations model is not a new concept. After the release of the 9/11 Commission report the model was introduced in the government intelligence sector by the Department of Homeland Security to enable better communication and collaboration between intelligence agencies and law enforcement. Today, security organizations successfully implement this model and see real results, including improved mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) to threats, lower rates of false positives for alerts, and higher effectiveness through prioritization of the most critical threats.
Threat Intelligence Operations (TI Ops) is the central nucleus or core of a successful cyber fusion operations model, integrating threat intelligence into security activities and tools. Organizations that want optimal performance from cyber fusion operations must invest in a platform that centralizes threat intelligence, automates key activities, and enables information sharing across the security organization and with external parties.
Cyber fusion operations can be centralized in one location, or it can be a virtual team deployed across the globe, as long as collaboration is enabled across professionals that handle security activities such as defense (threat detection & response, vulnerability management, threat hunting, etc.), offense (penetration testing, red teaming, etc.), incident response, and cyber risk management. By placing TI Ops at the core of these activities and using a modern threat intel operations platform to aggregate, enrich, analyze, and act on threat intelligence, security teams can use high-fidelity, intelligence-powered insights to drive the right decisions, activities, and actions.
The key to successful collaboration and effectiveness across cyber fusion operations is making threat intelligence readily available in a centralized location for all security functions. The ThreatConnect Platform is a modern threat intelligence operations platform that provides the capabilities for a cyber fusion operations function:
- Unified library for threat intelligence, integrating with the organization’s security tools to gather information from all relevant sources and collaborate in a single platform
- CAL™ – AI and ML-powered analytics and global intelligence that provides insights across thousands of ThreatConnect Platform users, novel threat feeds, and insights leveraging natural language processing.
- Threat Graph to quickly explore, pivot, and gain insight into the connections between seemingly disparate intelligence and data points to get a comprehensive picture of a threat.
- Low code automation capabilities to optimize and automate threat intelligence operations processes, work, and tradecraft
- Intelligence Anywhere allows analysts to leverage the ThreatConnect Threat Library in any web-based environment, easily access the knowledge in the ThreatConnect Platform, and add new threat intelligence data directly to the Threat Library without any copying and pasting. Check out this datasheet for more information about ThreatConnect Intelligence Anywhere
Cyber fusion operations aligns people, processes, and technology within the security organization to optimize security resources and activities. Through increased collaboration and improved efficiency, teams can realize breakthrough effectiveness, which will lighten the load for everyone and better protect the organization.
Read our newest How ThreatConnect Enables Cyber Fusion Operations Whitepaper to learn more!