Threat intelligence helps security teams quickly prioritize threats, mitigate critical risk, and respond to attacks. It also allows them to effectively communicate the nature of risks to top management and justify future investments in security and defense. This is no easy feat given today’s attacks, the cybersecurity skills shortage, and limited budgets. CISOs must calculate risk, balance resources, and efficiently use threat intelligence to effectively protect their organization’s users, data, reputation, and business goals.
Effective threat intelligence requires a rigorous process that starts with capturing and collecting data. Then, this data must be processed, analyzed, and disseminated to stakeholders in the form of alerts, recommendations, or reports. During this process, analysts test and verify trends, patterns, and other insights that help them answer stakeholders’ security requirements, such as the identity of a new ransomware gang or the impact of a new vulnerability in their organization.
Cracking the Cyber Code: An In-Depth Look at the World of Threat Intelligence
Indicators of compromise (IOCs) are the evidence of a threat—for example, malware hashes or malicious domains. These are typically collected by leveraging threat feeds or automated tools that scan for IOCs. When this information is combined with contextual threat intelligence from the underground criminal communities, it can empower security teams to stop advanced attacks before they succeed.
This type of intelligence is referred to as technical threat intelligence and helps security teams understand how attackers are attacking their environments. For example, they can identify the attack vector used in a specific incident and then determine the right countermeasures to take. It is a key component in Recorded Future’s approach to security, which helps customers resolve threats 63 percent faster than the industry average and cuts the critical hours needed for remediation by more than half.