What Is Threat Intelligence In Cyber Security

With the advancement and continuously evolving cyber threats, organizations can no longer afford to rely solely on reactive security measures to protect their assets. A proactive and data-driven approach is needed to stay ahead of the threats and minimize the potential impact of cyber attacks. 

This is where Cyber Threat Intelligence comes into the picture. In this article, we will explore what Cyber Threat Intelligence is, why it’s necessary in the current threat landscape, and the numerous benefits an organization can gain from implementing a Cyber Threat Intelligence program.

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber Security Threat Intelligence, or Cyber Threat intelligence is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about current and potential cyber threats to understand the attackers motives, potential targets, and methods. This information helps organizations to make faster, data-driven security decisions by shifting from a reactive approach to proactive approach in mitigating cyber attacks. 

Why Do You Need Cyber Threat Intelligence?

With increasingly sophisticated cyber attack methods, organizations must move beyond using reactive cyber security measures and implement a more proactive and predictive approach. Cyber threat intelligence provides important insight that is needed to predict and anticipate attacks by understanding existing vulnerabilities, threat indicators, and attack methodologies.

This knowledge helps security professionals prevent and contain attacks more quickly, potentially saving significant costs associated with recovering from cyber incidents. 

What Are The Types Of Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber Threat Intelligence covers a wide range of data and analysis related to cyber security and defences. However, they are mainly separated into three main categories based on the data type and applications:

Strategic Threat Intelligence

Strategic threat intelligence provides a high-level overview of an organization’s cyber threat landscape, which focuses on wider trends and their potential impact. Being less technical than other forms of threat intelligence, this type of intelligence analyzes threat actors, their motives, capabilities, and targets, as well as associated vulnerabilities and risks.  

Often presented in reports, strategic threat intelligence is less technical than other forms of threat intelligence, being designed to offer insights into potential attack severity and preventive actions for executive-level decision-makers. This enables organizations to better develop risk management strategies and mitigate the impact of future cyberattacks.  

Tactical Threat Intelligence

Tactical threat intelligence focuses on the specifics of cyberattacks by providing detailed information about threat actors’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to help security teams understand the attack and build effective defences. This intelligence, which is often automated and readily available through open-source feeds, reveals vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit and provides guidance on identifying such attacks.

While the reports are easily generated, this threat intelligence has a short lifespan due to its rapidly changing nature. It’s important to effectively analyze this data and go further than simply subscribing to feeds, to avoid being overwhelmed by information or acting on false positives. Tactical threat intelligence helps security teams strengthen existing defences, fix vulnerabilities, and improve incident response plans through methods like threat hunting, which proactively searches for hidden threats.

Operational Threat Intelligence

Operational threat intelligence provides real-time, incident-specific details about active cyber attacks. It focuses on the nature, motive, timing, and methods used in the attacks.  Being more detailed and immediate than strategic or tactical threat intelligence, this report is important in providing a timely threat detection and incident response.  

While it’s not fully automatable and requires human analysis, operational threat intelligence has a longer lifespan than tactical intelligence because the attacker cannot easily change their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) as quickly as they can change their tools.  

Gathering this intelligence oftentimes involves infiltrating hacker forums and online discussions, making it a highly resource-intensive but valuable form of threat intelligence data.

Cyber Threat Intelligence Sources

Threat intelligence sources are streams of actionable information on threats and possible malicious activities. Threat intelligence analysts collect these data from various sources. There are, however, several common sources for those data:

• Open-source intelligence (OSINT) Data: This method involves gathering information from publicly available sources, which is achieved by using tools and techniques to collect data from various sources such as search engines, web services, website analysis, emails, and other publicly accessible resources.  
  
  
• Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) Data: This method involves gathering digital evidence from various sources, including internal data such as network logs and incident response records, and external sources, as well as creating custom IOCs based on observed threats.
  
  
• Malware Analysis Data: This method involves examining malware samples to understand their origins, functionality, and impact. This process uses specialized tools to dissect how a malware operates and its origin.
  
  
• Deep & Dark Web Intelligence Data: This method refers to the information found in encrypted and anonymized online environments which is commonly known as the dark web. This intelligence can provide insights into cyber criminal activities, offer early warnings of upcoming attacks, and reveal the motives and methods used by the perpetrators.

Benefits of Using Cyber Threat Intelligence

A well-established Cyber Threat Intelligence with an experienced threat intelligence analyst can greatly improve your organization’s cyber security. This includes:

• Better Risk Management: Cyber Threat Intelligence provides actionable insights into the cyber attackers’ motives, tools, and methods. This information can help SOCs and CISOs with assessing the risks and allocate resources effectively to maximize threat detection and protection.
  
  
• Fortified Incident Response: Going further than just prevention, Cyber Threat Intelligence prepares organizations to better respond and recover from cyber attacks. Having a better understanding of the details of a breach can help significantly reduce its impact on an organization.
  
  
• Proactive Cyber Defense Strategy: Instead of simply reacting to known attacks, Cyber Threat Intelligence allows an organization to better understand potential attackers and predict their moves, allowing for a proactive defence strategy.
  
  
• Cost Reduction: Organizations can reduce the cost and required skills by leveraging external threat intel, effectively channelling resources into further improving the defence. 

Conclusion

Cyber Threat Intelligence is an important component of modern cyber security strategy. By proactively collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about potential cyber threats, organizations can move beyond reactive security measures and adopt a more predictive and proactive approach to cyber defence. This will allow an organization to be better prepared with better incident response planning by knowing a threat or attack in advance than using the old method of reacting after an incident has happened.
If you would like to know more about Cyber Threat Intelligence, please don’t hesitate to contact us.