Benefits of Cyber Threat Intelligence to Your Business
Let’s start by explaining what cyber-attack intelligence is all about. This term originally stood for any data collected during an attack against a computer network. It would be used to better understand what was happening, who was attacking you, how they were doing it, and how they could adapt over time.
Today’s cyber threat intelligence covers a bigger scope than it did back in 2009. It includes all data obtained from tracking and analyzing cyber-criminal infrastructure, malware, and software over time to discover the patterns and behaviors that point out possible attacks before they happen or at least give you an idea of where to start investigating. To go even further, we can look at machine learning and predictive analytics used for this type of information gathering to create what we call “cyber attack intelligence.” By looking at all these elements as a whole, analysts can make very accurate predictions on how attackers will behave over time. In extreme cases, the analysis could even lead to taking specific actions against those people or organizations behind the attacks or compromised machines.
Now that we know what cyber threat intelligence entails let’s look at the benefits you can get from using it to protect your business. First of all, threat intelligence can prevent attacks against your organization. It does this by increasing the chances of detecting attackers within your network or environment before they are able to cause any damage or disruption. This detection can be done through indicators of compromise (IoC), which are data points gathered from different sources and analysis on their behavior and relationships with one another. For example, if a new piece of malware is set to communicate with a command and control server on IP address 1.2.3.4 and also downloads some payloads over HTTP while encrypting others over SMTP, there’s a good chance someone is trying to enter your network – too many similarities exist with other malware samples already seen before.
Threat intelligence can also help you prioritize where to investigate in case an attack does get through. Nowadays, cybercriminals are using the same methods and tools repeatedly because they know detection systems look for specific patterns. As a result, threat intelligence can tell you exactly what happened during an intrusion based on IoC’s gathered from multiple sources like honeypots or data exfiltration reports. By understanding that certain techniques were used by attackers, security personnel can then focus their investigation on the right priorities to get more information quickly and minimize any damage done.
Finally, threat intelligence helps reduce the time required for investigations since it takes into account previous data that has already been gathered. This usually saves you countless hours trying to figure out what the adversary is doing and where he’s operating from. The more information you have about your attackers, the easier it becomes to understand their techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs), which are often reused over time. You may even consider automating certain security processes like an incident response or network management to reduce the risk of human error when responding to an attack.
To sum up, cyber threat intelligence can be extremely beneficial for any business looking for better protection against cyber threats professionally, economically, and technologically. Threat intelligence feeds can come from both public cloud providers as well as private solutions depending on your needs, but they should always respect two important concepts: accuracy and privacy. If you need help determining if threat intelligence is right for your business, give us a call today. We’ll be happy to set up a consultation with you and discuss all the advantages of this powerful technology.
