Cyber Crime and Threat Intelligence

It's no secret that cybercrime is on the rise. To stay ahead of the curve, organizations need to develop and strengthen their threat intelligence capabilities. Doing so allows organizations and information security professionals to gain access to data and information that will help them understand who is attacking, what their goals are, and how to best defend against them.

Cyber Threat Intelligence Benefits

The world’s economic and cultural institutions have been changed forever as a result of digital technology and connectivity. Digital technologies have introduced new risks, and cyber threat intelligence is the knowledge that enables you to prevent or mitigate them. You can disrupt adversaries and defend organizations by utilizing cyber threat intelligence. The information and insights provided allow information security professionals to make rapid, confident, and well-informed decisions regarding a company's security.

Security operations and incident response teams frequently cannot triage all the alerts they receive. Intelligence provides information that automatically prioritizes and filters information and other threats so that they can respond properly and efficiently. Vulnerability management teams also benefit from intelligence. It enables them to more accurately prioritize the most important issues based on external knowledge and context. Fraud prevention, risk assessment, and other critical security functions are all enhanced when practitioners share a comprehensive picture of the current threat landscape. Threat intelligence provides information on threat actors, their actions, methods, and procedures, as well as data from across the internet.

Cyber threat intelligence should save analysts time by providing them with the ability to quickly find and fix problems. It should also make it easier for analysts to collaborate on cases, share their findings, and build upon the work of others. By taking advantage of cyber threat intelligence, analysts can maximize their efficiency, minimize false positives, and reduce the overall workload.

Threat Intelligence Feeds

Cyber threat intelligence feeds are one of the easiest ways for organizations to start developing and strengthening their threat intelligence capabilities. These feeds provide real-time streams of data on potential cyber threats and risks that can help organizations take action to protect themselves against attacks. To make the most out of cyber threat intelligence feeds, organizations need to prioritize their information and take action on it. Additionally, analysts should track the effectiveness of new security controls implemented as a result of cyber threat intelligence to optimize their cybersecurity posture. By taking these steps, organizations can improve their overall cybersecurity posture and better protect themselves against cyber attacks.

Information security professionals may choose to blacklist communications and connection requests from malicious sources using the information provided by these feeds. Some paid feeds are just aggregations of open source feeds, so don't bother wasting money. Typically, instead of gathering threat intelligence from public sources, commercial feeds buy data from closed-off marketplaces used by criminals.

The immediacy of threat intelligence feeds makes it simple to get a quick, real-time look at the external threat landscape. However, ingesting too much data may overwhelm analysts who are already inundated with countless daily alerts and notifications.

Actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence Feeds

Enriched feeds with context are needed for information to be actionable so external information can be correlated and used to identify potential threats. Once a potential attack has been identified, an alert will be created. If analysts determine that a new security control is required (for example, a new firewall rule), it can be implemented as with any other security update, and the alert marked as finished. While each alert still necessitates personal attention, aggregating and combining the proper feeds may drastically reduce analyst time spent addressing them. Some threat intelligence solutions can also automatically handle common alerts.

Threat Feed Analytics

It's critical to evaluate the feeds and data you wish to consume based on intelligence goals and priorities. Too much data coming out of the feeds can inadvertently overwhelm analysts and increase their workload. By setting intelligence goals first and then prioritizing threat information based on them, you can avoid this issue.

Furthermore, you can track the effectiveness of new security controls created as a result of each feed. For example, if a new security control that blocked more malicious connection attempts reflected positively on the feed that informed it, you could track it.

Conclusion

The use of threat intelligence has been a game changer for many organizations and information security professionals, as it allowed them to process more relevant information than ever before. However, free feeds quickly became crammed with inaccurate data and false positives. These issues coupled with the vast amount of available data started causing problems.