Threat Intelligence Sharing as an Effective Cyber Security Strategy

What is cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber Threat intelligence is information gathering and analysis that helps organizations understand the nature of cyber threats and vulnerabilities. Also, it helps with proactive protection and preparedness to mitigate the risk in the event of an attack. In addition, it allows organizations to correlate data from various sources to make better decisions about their security posture.

Types of Threat Intelligence

1. Strategic.
2. Tactical.
3. Technical.
4. Operational.

Strategic

The purpose of Strategic Threat Intelligence is to provide a long-term view of an organization’s risk. The Strategic is an essential component for any organization because it helps identify threats and vulnerabilities before they happen. Also, the current intelligence allows companies to understand them, assess the risk, and decide on a course of action.

Tactical

Tactical threat intelligence provides insight into the plans and motives of the attacker. Moreover, it offers information about what threats are active in a particular region or industry niche and how to deal with the attack effectively. Generally, tactical intelligence is often used with other defensive techniques to combat a cyber-attack before affecting the organization.

Technical

Technical Threat Intelligence is an analytical process that helps security professionals and organizations identify, classify, and prioritize new cyber threats. Naturally, its process begins with detecting a new threat by a third party or through proprietary methods. Then, the process classifies the new threat to evaluate how severe the risk of the particular cyber-attack is. Therefore, it helps to determine what type of countermeasures would be most effective for countering this cyber-attack.

Operational

Companies use Operational Threat Intelligence (OTI) for day-to-day activities to ensure the cyber protection of their employees on the job. Also, organizations can use OTI for incident response by providing real-time insights about malware, new attack vectors, vulnerabilities, or other security issues.

Benefits of cyber Threat Intelligence

1. Assists Intelligence Analysts to discover bad actors and implement precise predictions to evade information theft.
2. Supports Security Analysts to improve the cyber defense process of an organization.
3. Facilitates Vulnerability Management because it collects and analyzes information from different data sources.
4. Assures that Security Operations Centers (SOC) receive notifications from incidents in real-time.
5. Enables the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) quickly incidents investigations, analyses, and responses.

What is the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle?

Threat Intelligence Lifecycle (TIL) is a process that organizations follow to maintain their information security. It helps them identify threats and take the necessary steps to manage the risk of attack.

Key Objectives of each phase in the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle

1. Direction.
2. Collection.
3. Processing.
4. Analysis.
5. Dissemination and Feedback.

Direction

The Direction phase allows set goals for the threat intelligence program. Generally, security organizations should understand the types of threat intelligence to protect assets and respond to threats.

Objectives of the Direction Phase:

1. Define the strategy for developing and implementing a threat intelligence program involving different departments led by the senior team.
2. Establishing a budget for developing, maintaining, and deploying the threat intelligence program.
3. Developing an understanding of the threats that might affect the organization, including identifying new types of malware or malicious actors.
4. Determining what assets and business processes are vulnerable to attack. How to protect them.
5. Identifying gaps in security intelligence and resources needed to close them.
6. Assign roles and responsibilities for staff involved.

Collection

The collection is the process of accumulating data from different sources to help organizations identify and analyze future threats.

Objectives of the Collection Phase:

1. Gathering information about threats by analyzing social media, websites, and forums.
2. Infiltrating closed sources such as dark web forums.
3. Scanning open-source news and blogs.
4. Pulling metadata and logs from internal networks.
5. Supporting conversations and targeted interviews with knowledgeable sources.

Processing

The Processing phase takes the raw data from the collection phase and summarizes it. Therefore, the Processing phase involves creating structured, manageable data sets out of raw data. Then, here is where data analysts identify which threats are most important to the company. Hence, they produce a final report on their findings, summarizing what they found and recommending handling the situation.

Objectives of the Processing Phase:

1. Cleaning up data (removing duplicate entries or discrepancies between different datasets with similar content) and reorganizing information before interpretation.
2. Define the threats ( where they come from, how they manifest themselves).
3. Preparing the data for analysis, which is the next stage of the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle.

Analysis

The Analysis phase of the TIL is about using information collected and processed intelligence to produce intelligence for a company’s needs. Also, the Analysis period has two parts, analysis by humans and machine learning algorithms.

Objectives of the Analysis Phase:

1. Analyzing data to find any patterns or connections that might help predict a possible incident.
2. Define implications that may come with their use of different technologies like Artificial Intelligence.
3. Prioritizing these threats based on their severity and what other operations may be affected by them, like human safety or finances.
4. Determining how we can counter these threats, like ongoing collaboration with partners or implementing new security features in our software products.
5. Evaluating what type of intelligence is needed to counter the current threat and who has those pieces of intelligence.
6. Produce Data Protection Objectives (DPOs) against cyberattacks, physical attacks, insider attacks to protect the organization and customer data.
7. Validate conclusions through machine learning algorithms that are trained on known malicious behavior on the job.

Dissemination and Feedback

The Dissemination and Feedback phase informs the stakeholders about potential risks, vulnerabilities, and threats discovered in the organization during previous phases. Companies can spread information and measure its impact on people’s lives through the current stage to improve their processes.

Objectives of the Dissemination and Feedback Phase:

1. Provide updates on the latest intelligence to all stakeholders.
2. Publishing information through blogs, wikis, or social media posts.
3. Utilizing feedback from stakeholders and creating a plan for improvements the future campaigns.

What are Threat Intelligence tools?

Representatives from the intelligence community define a Threat Intelligence tool as a software application that enables users to collect, process, store, and display information about security threats to assist organizations in managing their cybersecurity.

Best 5 Threat Intelligence tools

UTMStack

UTMStack is a free Next-Gen SIEM and compliance platform that helps SMBs identify and mitigate cyber threats. Also, the tool involves all the phases of the intelligence cycle, such as analysis, collection of data, and more. However, it includes the development and implementation of protection measures and up-to-date monitoring to have better prevention. UTMStack uses threat intelligence solutions from multiples IP feeds and blacklisted domains to detect the most complex attacks. In addition, it’s capable of reporting any threats.

In conclusion, UTMStack is an intelligent information processing system that delivers all cybersecurity services. Some of them are SOC as a service, Penetration Testing, Vulnerability Assessment, Dark Web Monitoring, etc. Also, how the SIEM flattens the learning curve, customers can easily understand whether they are being attacked and by whom.

IBM X-Force

IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence is a cloud-based analytic software that provides valuable information about potential cybersecurity threats and attacks. Generally, IBM analyzes data from the dark web to get information about potential threats. Also, the threat intelligence database is updated continuously based on new findings and intel sources. On the other hand, the tool can analyze over 400 million events per day to provide users with updates on emerging information. In addition, IBM offers a score to evaluate the risk level of threats.

McAfee Enterprise Security Manager

McAfee SIEM is a threat intelligence tool for enterprises to monitor their networks and systems. It provides an overview of the current threats that the enterprise is facing to help them make informed decisions. Also, McAfee detects the newest threats without slowing down and without human intervention, ensuring that experts have access to updated data. The SIEM can be set up to automatically block any new threats before they reach the company’s network or system. Also, it has a wide range of advanced analytics.

SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

The security intelligence tool from SolarWinds is a free and open-source platform that provides detailed information about events or anomalies. In turn, it allows an immediate incident response by IT experts in organizations. Also, it identifies threats by correlating events from different sources like network flow records, vulnerability scans, malware alerts, etc. However, the SEM Threat Intelligence Platform was designed for environments where security teams need to protect high levels of criticality.

LogRhythm

LogRhythm threat intelligence tool is a security system for IT administrators and security analysts. In turn, it aggregates, analyzes, and stores data from various sources to provide action. Also, the SIEM through SOC allows monitoring malicious activities and alerting experts when something suspicious is found. LogRhythm’s developers designed the system to be scalable, flexible, enterprise-grade. The software also has a REST API to integrate with other third-party products.