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How to Aggregate Relevant Threat Data
Is your cybersecurity team small? Or, are you looking to make your team more efficient? It can be difficult to know where to start when you have limited resources. Today we begin a six-blog series that will cover how to make the most of your cybersecurity program when you have a small (or growing) team.
Step One is about collecting and correlating relevant data for your organization. In order to start proactively protecting your organization from threats, you need information about what and who may be trying to attack your network. One of the most common ways to start is subscribing to and aggregating threat feeds.
A platform provides a central place to automatically ingest all of your internal and external threat feeds. It normalizes the information so it is easy to understand. It also provides a scalable way to generate metrics from the feeds, including level of enrichment, confidence rating, and threat rating. Ratings allow you to prioritize your threat data, so your team can work on the most malicious threats first.
Feeds are an excellent resource for your cybersecurity program. But, they aren’t the only resource, or even necessarily the best resource for your organization. Threat intelligence can and will come in a number of different formats. Everything that contains information about a threat, from an email to a .txt file, is a valuable resource that could help you improve your cybersecurity practice.
When you only have a few people on your team, finding time to locate, normalize, and store all of the various sources of threat intelligence is a challenge. A platform does this for you. It ingests multiple file formats, both structured or unstructured. More importantly, it will automatically parse the indicators out of these files for you. This eliminates the need to manually copy and paste indicators, giving you more time for actual analysis.
It even gives you some options on how to give the indicators more context. Context gives you the entire picture about a threat: where it has been seen before, the techniques that were used, etc. The more you know about a threat, the better you can fight it. Then, a platform stores that information in a central threat repository for you. With a small team, you shouldn’t be spending your valuable time manually reading files, and copying and pasting indicators. Let a platform automate that process for you.