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Businesses seeking to understand their risk exposure need to realize that they can’t adequately quantify risk without cyber threat intelligence on the capabilities, intentions, and most frequently employed techniques and tactics of present-day adversaries.
In order for quantitative risk calculations to be both accurate and actionable, they must incorporate contextual knowledge into their determinations of probability. An enterprise’s cyber risks are not merely vertical-specific or size-specific.
They also vary according to a myriad of other factors ranging from the organization’s overarching IT and computing strategies to its presence in the media. And attackers are diverse – possessing a broad array of motivations, tools, skills, and strategies.
Bringing current threat intelligence into your risk assessment and decision support procedures enables you to discern which adversaries are most likely to target your organization, based on what’s been observed in the real world. Without this perspective, your analysis will remain incomplete and retain blind spots.
What is Threat Intelligence?
Threat intelligence is current and accurate information about threat actors’ capabilities, infrastructure, motives, goals, and resources. Cyber Threat Intelligence involves analyzing information about threats and producing guidance to determine what steps must be taken in response to those threats. This information is gathered from two different sources – internal and external. “This process… is incredibly complex and relies on a combination of people, processes, and tools to generate, consume and act on the intelligence.” – SANS Institute, 2020 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) Survey
Organizations that are just getting started with threat intelligence rarely have made a large investment in intelligence processes. In such organizations, there is likely no one person or group charged with the management of threat intelligence automation.
It is tempting to turn on product-integrated feeds, and this will suffice for that product if the intelligence is properly refined and vetted by the provider. But this refinement rarely occurs within intelligence feeds and, as such, problems typically arise when hooking threat intelligence directly into products.
A successful cyber threat intelligence program shows its ability by the number of actionable insights it generates. Threat Intelligence enables teams to focus on the ever-changing cyber landscape and thus understanding the different potential risks that a business may face. A Threat Intelligence Platform helps security teams to further that process by automating collecting intelligence from any source, reducing false positives, enriching threat data with context, and producing a list of threat priorities among many other qualities.
To learn about how Threat Intelligence can help your organization, read more in our Whitepaper —
RISK | THREAT | RESPONSE
The Strategic Advantages of Shifting to a Risk-Led Security Program
ThreatConnect’s Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) provides all the capabilities above and focuses on the following three things:
- Aggregate – TIP facilitates the collection and processing of data from internal sources as well as external feeds – normalizing and parsing the data to prepare for use
- Analyze – The aggregated data can be analyzed manually or automatically. Analysis validates that indicators remain valid, and highlights associations within the data. Indicator enrichment and ranking are also important TIP functions.
- Enable Action – TIP makes threat intelligence available for use in network defenses and other integrated security products within the environment. It can also feed external threat intelligence sources, enabling the organization to contribute to the greater good of the security community.
ThreatConnect’s TIP reduces complexity, streamlines processes, and puts the power directly in the hands of your security team.
Calculating levels of risk your organization faces can only be accurate when utilizing multiple sources of threat intelligence. A great Threat Intelligence Platform supports analysis and delivers deep insight and context with multiple threat intelligence sources and feeds, to help identify, analyze and take action against threats that matter most.