The Benefits Of Sharing Threat Intelligence

Uploaded on 2024-04-22 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW

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Cybercrime is rampant and no company is completely safe from online threats. Organizations have to continuously monitor their systems to detect known threats and suspicious activities. However, cybercriminals are aware of the cybersecurity protection strategies companies use, so they regularly come up with new ways to gain unauthorized access to their systems.

Companies have to be a step ahead of malicious actors and use threat intelligence to proactively protect themselves. Threat intelligence is a detailed report outlining the cyber threats businesses face and the actions they can take to prevent them or remediate security incidents that may occur upon exposure.

Cybersecurity professionals use threat intelligence to strengthen their organization's security posture and effectively respond to attacks before they cause significant damage to their IT infrastructure. These professionals create threat intelligence by getting security-related data from different sources and analyzing them to discover patterns and trends that help them understand and tackle potential threats.

Organizations sometimes share their threat intelligence with others because security issues can have disastrous and long-lasting effects on affected companies. There is software that facilitates threat intelligence sharing, but in some cases, the intelligence may be difficult for recipients to interpret.

This is why add-on communication programs like STIX and TAXII are necessary to use with threat intelligence sharing software.

They standardize threat intelligence languages within the software so anyone receiving the information can use it to adequately protect their organization.

The Lifecycle Of Threat Intelligence

The threat intelligence process varies between companies but they generally follow these steps:

Planning: During this step, cybersecurity analysts will work with business leaders to determine the intelligence requirements. They will decide what the scope of the threat intelligence report will cover.

Data collection: The security team seeks information about the threats in the scope of their report. These include but are not limited to information about the cybercriminal group perpetuating the attack they are looking out for, the types of companies previously attacked, and the vulnerabilities they exploited in successful attacks.
They can get this data from multiple sources like previously affected companies, internal security logs, online cybersecurity communities (or forums), and threat intelligence feeds.

Data processing: The raw data collected has to be aggregated, standardized, and correlated by the security team to make it easier to analyze. This process involves but is not limited to applying a threat intelligence framework to the data collected about past security incidents and filtering out false positives. Most companies use tools with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to process the raw data they collect and identify patterns or trends related to specific threats.

Threat analysis: This is the step where security analysts study, test, and verify the identified patterns and trends so they can teach business leaders about the threats they face and provide recommendations to prevent them.

Dissemination: Security analysts give their company’s leadership detailed threat intelligence reports based on their findings and they will take action based on the contents of the report. This may include installing firewalls, alert systems, and antivirus programs. During this process, cybersecurity personnel may share their report with their peers in other companies.

Feedback: The team that planned the threat intelligence exercise will meet to ensure all the requirements and objectives of the exercise are met.

Endnote

Threat intelligence prepares businesses for potential attacks that could have otherwise disrupted their operations. It is helpful to share threat intelligence reports with other companies in need and the wider cybersecurity community because it thwarts the efforts of cybercriminals.

STIX and TAXII help cybersecurity professionals make sense of intelligence reports they receive, so they can act on them.

Image: HT Ganzo

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