Maturing Cybersecurity Infrastructure with Intelligence-Powered Security Operations
Technology
Learn about the persistent threat, lessons for the future, and how ThreatConnect is working to protect its customers.
Challenge
The customer was facing the following challenges:
1. Immature security stack with multiple silos.
2. Primarily using manual methods to track Indicators of Compromise (IOCs).
3. Lack of context around OSINT feeds and understanding what is credible.
4. Lacked a solution that allows information to be easily shared between a Threat Intelligence Team and a Security Operations Team.
5. Lacked the ability to manage and analyze the collected threat data to characterize and prioritize into actionable threat intelligence for threat hunting, incident response, or security defense tools.
Solution
ThreatConnect provided the following solutions:
1. ThreatConnect removes silos around data and connects processes between SOC analysts, Incident Responders, and Cyber Threat Intelligence analysts by providing a common platform for them to execute daily tasks and manage their workflows together. When the team is freed up from focusing on manual and mundane tasks, morale improves and existing technology investments are able to be leveraged more strategically, and productivity and effectiveness can scale to meet the business needs.
2. ThreatConnect’s CAL™ helps teams learn about the reputation of IOCs and apply classifiers to help facilitate faster decision making by prioritizing what matters most. CAL can help remove junk IOCs, determine credibility of IOCs, and identify which feeds to enable, equipping the team with the information needed to have a proactive defense. ThreatConnect aggregates hundreds of OSINT and commercial sources of threat intelligence and allows teams to create their own prioritized threat landscape with internally derived threat intelligence as well. However, we don’t stop there. Context on IOCs and known threat groups is critical.
3. With ThreatConnect’s report cards, analysts can easily see any feed’s performance to understand variables such as a feed’s reliability rating and unique indicators, when it was first reported, and its scoring disposition. These insights are designed to help make better decisions during threat analysis and investigation.
4. ThreatConnect creates a centralized repository of threat data to collect, contextualize and disseminate data to the security team and their tools. With ThreatConnect’s TI OPs Platform, organizations can record, analyze, and interact with all of the information related to a case from one place. With this, teams can enrich cases leveraging internal and external threat intelligence and add learned intelligence back into the platform itself. This ultimately creates a feedback loop to ensure information is constantly being both gathered and applied for smarter decision making.
5. Free the team from mundane data collection tasks to focus on analysis and response. By leveraging and harnessing the power of threat intelligence operations, this organization was able to be more effective, resilient, and adaptive. An intelligence driven approach provides intelligence on an adversary’s capabilities, attack patterns, and informs how you build and configure your capabilities to defend your network better. Actionable intelligence provides the situational awareness and context that is needed when trying to extract meaning from data and apply it within a changing environment.
Outcome
ENHANCE INTELLIGENCE WITH GLOBAL CONTEXT
ThreatConnect’s CAL™ is an innovative architecture that distills billions of data points, offering immediate insights into the nature, prevalence, and relevance of a threat. CAL provides global context that leverages anonymously shared insights from ThreatConnect users, open-source intelligence, malware intelligence, and more, providing global context that has never before been available.
MAKING THE LANDSCAPE MANAGEABLE
Even for the most skilled teams, keeping up with the threat landscape, complex IT environments, evolving regulatory environments, and constant security alerts is not easy to achieve, much less quickly. This organization recognized its need to mature its security operations and chose its solution based on the concept of leveraging intelligence-driven operations. It was imperative that they have the flexibility to control the right levels of automation and automate entire actions or specific aspects of actions that fit their unique needs.
Leveraging ThreatConnect’s Playbooks to automate and solidify their processes and Case Management capabilities to memorialize and structure their workflows, they reduced the time it takes to uncover relevant threat intelligence while working cases and mitigate the risks of spending significant time chasing false positives. Using customizable dashboards, they could visualize the data and monitor security operations and intelligence across teams. This enabled them to quantify their return on investment by automating and operationalizing their activities over time.
A PARTNERSHIP TOWARD MATURITY
Reaching their strategic goals of maturing their security operations is not an overnight transformation. They were looking for a partner to come alongside them, helping them recognize and set critical benchmarks for their processes and programs as they grow and change over time. ThreatConnect’s Customer Success team is committed to helping to minimize risks and maximize the value that a threat intelligence operations platform brings. The Customer Success team helped them as they defined their strategic and tactical objectives and worked alongside them to configure and deploy their instance and required integrations. Ultimately, ThreatConnect laid the foundation for intelligence-based decision-making and cross-team collaboration, equipping them with an infrastructure they can build upon for years to come.
