Cyber Threat Intelligence: Meaning and Types

Summary: By leveraging cyber security intelligence, you can easily gain invisibility into unknown cyber attackers and identify motives behind attacks. Let’s find out some other benefits of using cyber threat intel below.

Cyber threat intelligence comes at the forefront of modern cybersecurity and acts as an essential component in the fight against evolving digital threats. In a landscape where cyber security attackers change their tactics frequently, organizations use cyber intelligence to gain invaluable insights into potential risks, vulnerabilities, and the methods used by malicious agents.

With it, you can successfully anticipate, prevent, and mitigate cyber threats. In this article, we will learn more about it and how you can leverage it for your company.

What is Meant by Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence is the data which is collected, processed and analyzed to understand the threat actors’ targets, motives, and attack behaviors. It enables users to make quick decisions and change their strategies to fight against various threat actors.

Why Do You Need Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence benefits companies by enabling them to process the threat data and gain a better understanding of cyber attackers, respond quickly to incidents, and proactively take measures to avoid attacks in the future. Some other reasons to leverage threat intelligence include:

• Provides visibility into unknown attackers or threat actors
• Empowers teams by highlighting attackers’ motives and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
• Helps in understanding the attackers decision-making procedure
• Automating data collection and processing through machine learning
• Managing everyday flow of threat data

Who Benefits the Most from Threat Intelligence?

Security and risk management teams are benefiting the most from threat intelligence as it helps them streamline the threat and security related tasks within the organization. Here are the team members who are benefitted the most from threat intelligence:

• Sec/IT Analyst: The analyst can optimize prevention or detection capabilities and improve their defense against cyber-attacks.
• SOC Analyst: Threat intelligence can help SOC analyst prioritize incidents after considering their risk and impact on the company.
• Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT): The team can leverage data to speed up incident investigations, management, prioritization, etc.
• Intel Analyst: With the help of threat intelligence, the analyst can identify and track threat actors attacking the organization.
• Executive Management: The management can better understand cyber security risks and the options available to address them.

What is the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle?

The Threat Intelligence Lifecycle provides security teams with a structured methodology to collect, analyze, and use threat intelligence. Further, the cycle helps in understanding the threat landscape in a better way to efficiently react to security threats. Threat Intelligence Lifecycle works in six steps as enumerated below:

Step 1: Planning: In the first step, the security team and other people involved in security decision making set the requirements of threat intelligence. For example, they can plan to discover attackers and their motives, attack surfaces, and strategies to combat these attacks.

Step 2: Collection: In the second step, the team collects all the data needed to accomplish the objectives set in step one. Depending on these objectives, the security team will use traffic logs, available data sources, social media, forums, etc., to collect data.

Step 3: Processing: Once the data is collected, it will be converted into readable format for analysis. The procedure includes filtering false positives, decrypting files, translating data from foreign resources, etc. You can also use a threat intelligence tool to automate this procedure through AI and machine learning.

Step 4: Analysis: After the data is processed, the team will test and verify trends, patterns, and insights through this data. The insights are then used to accomplish objectives set in the initial step.

Step 5: Dissemination: In this step, the threat intelligence team converts their data findings into digestible format and shares the same with stakeholders. The information is often presented in one of two pages without any use of technical jargon.

Step 6: Feedback: This is the final stage of threat intelligence lifecycle where feedback is collected from shareholders and decision is taken on whether there should be some changes in threat intelligence operations. Moreover, the next threat intelligence cycle is planned if the stakeholders’ requirements are not met in the current cycle.

What are the Types of Threat Intelligence?

Cyber threat intelligence is mainly categorized into three categories that cater to different stages of decision-making and responses to the organization’s cybersecurity strategy.

Tactical threat intelligence focuses on ongoing threats whereas Operational and Strategic Threat Intelligences focus on deeper threat analysis. Here is a detailed enumeration of each of them below.

1. Tactical Threat Intelligence

It is utilized by the security operations center (SOC) for detecting and responding to ongoing cyber-attacks. It mainly focuses on common Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) such as bad IP addresses, file hashes, URLs, etc.

Additionally, it also helps the incident response team in filtering out false positives and intercepting genuine attacks.

2. Operational Threat Intelligence

This type of threat intelligence provides knowledge about attacks. It focuses on providing details on TTPs and behaviors of identified threat actors such as their vectors, vulnerabilities, and also the company assets that hackers can target.

This information can help in identifying threat actors who can attack organizations and formulating security controls to curb their attacks.

3. Strategic Threat Intelligence

Strategic threat intelligence involves analyzing and understanding threat trends, potential risks, and emerging threats that can impact the organization in the long run. It provides decision-makers with insights on the global threat landscape to form effective long-term security strategies.

This comprises collecting data on geopolitical developments, industry trends, cyber threats, etc., to anticipate and mitigate risks.

What is Meant by Cyber Threat Intelligence Program?

Cyber Threat Intelligence Program brings all the cyber threat feeds into a single feed to view them together instead separately. By viewing them together, you can easily identify cyber threats, trends and events and changes in the tactics of hackers.

With threat intelligence programs, the information is presented in a way that makes it easier for you to perform threat analysis.

Conclusion

Cyber threat intelligence serves as a powerful tool providing organizations with the means to comprehend the current threat landscape and predict and prepare for future cyber-attacks.

By leveraging the insights derived from cyber security intelligence, you can develop security policies and procedures that help you in keeping your organization safe from cyber threats.

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