Threat Intelligence and Its Profound Importance for Organizations

Threat intelligence is a technology of novelty.

It is an efficient tool to detect, analyze, and neutralize security threats.

Threat Intelligence reinforces a security system against potential vulnerabilities, thus assisting an organization’s data security teams to act proactively to identify security risks and eliminate them.

The efficacy of this technology is such that jeopardizing a company’s valuable data would be a sure outcome if its application is put into question.

However, they have also given rise to threats like cyberattacks from countless unauthorized sources floating across the digital sphere. These threats, quite understandably, pose a greater risk to cybersecurity.

Reportedly, the Covid-19 pandemic has also witnessed an upsurge in cybercrime by 600% aside from damaging human lives and paralyzing the economic activities in the world.

These threats (received through emails) are deceptively dangerous in compromising the core of an organization’s security system, unless an efficient reinforcement of cyber threat intelligence is put in place.

Threat intelligence is said to be an effective technique to eliminate the chances for network security vulnerabilities or cyber threats. Consequently, it allows you to make informed decisions regarding the deployment of security reinforcement. If used smartly, the technology can decode the deceptivity of any cyber threat masquerading as friendly in a host system.

Inundation of countless data and their effective protection from authorized access has piled pressure on cyber experts to devise the most strategically best steps, to ensure uncompromised protection of valuable data against cyber threats.

The challenges associated with tackling cyber threats can be handled by supervising and managing ambiguously structured data, regular inflow of massive data, hoax alerts across diverse, unconnected security systems, and so on so forth. Threat intelligence involves a pivotal role in handling such critical requirements.

Organizations lacking technical know-how of how to deal with data surfeit end up making the job of their in-house data analysts painfully difficult to understand what to prioritize and what to ignore.

Cyber threat intelligence, on the other hand, provides an effective solution to these issues. It leverages the power of machine learning to facilitate the automation of data collection and processing.

Besides, the solution also involves compiling unstructured data from diverse sources and connecting the dots after yielding the context on indicators of compromise (IoCs) and procedures related to threat factors.

Threat intelligence holds its importance, in terms of being timely, providing context, and being easily understandable to the decision-makers.

The benefit of threat intelligence is not limited to a particular individual or industry. Believed to be the domain of elite analysts, the value provided by threat intelligence covers diverse security functions for companies, irrespective of size.

Teams handling security operations can’t always process the incoming alerts. With threat intelligence, the teams can automatically prioritize and filter threat alerts, after integrating TI with the security solutions they already use.

Besides, threat intelligence is also helpful for vulnerability management teams by providing them external insights and context with which they can identify key vulnerabilities more accurately.

Moreover, threat intelligence facilitates a better understanding of key threat areas by enriching fraud prevention, risk analysis, and different sorts of security processes.

When it comes to creating threat intelligence that’s actionable, asking the right question, and analyzing how your intelligence goals resonate with your company’s core values is a very important consideration.

This step involves the collection of data from multiple sources, both internal and external ones (internal sources involve network event logs and records of past incident responses while external sources involve open web, the dark web, and technical sources).

It involves sorting out the collected data, organizing the same with metadata tags, and ensuring superfluous data is filtered out.

It ensures that the processed data reveals sense like identify potential security issues and informing the concerned authority in a way that suits the intelligence requirements defined in the planning and direction stage.

This stage involves timely distributing of the done product to its right people.

This is the last step signaling the intelligence cycle coming full circle. At this stage, the intelligence becomes very much relates to the initial planning and direction phase.

The team in charge of making the “initial request” analyzes the finished intelligence product to see if their questions were answered. When done, it sets in motion the procedures and objectives of the next intelligence cycle.

The mechanism permitting the functionality of threat intelligence is based on the collected data revealing potential threats. Does that mean threat intelligence is just a revelation of threat data? Not at all. It’s beyond that.

For threat intelligence to be able to work effectively, it depends on the efficacy of contextual data and its correlation with the threat information.

The contextual data stands for the first appearance of a flagged threat and its influence on a victim organization.

IOC (Indicators of Compromise) refers to the forensic data either detected in a computer system’s log entries or files, bearing a warning sign of potential data breach on a system/network. Once identified, an organization can proactively devise necessary steps augmenting the chance to neutralize data threats. The indicators of compromise include

With cybersecurity threats rising unabated from all around the world, companies/organizations deem involvement of threat intelligence as an imperative tactic to efficiently and effectively address security risks, vulnerabilities and neutralize them proactively.

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