By:

Key Benefits of Threat Intelligence Management

Change is the only constant. Are you prepared?

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence is the comprehensive understanding of a threat’s capabilities, motivations, goals, resources, and infrastructure.  organized, analyzed, and refined information regarding potential or current attacks towards an organization and to facilitate understanding of common and extreme threats.

Cybercriminals gain access to critical assets and data by leveraging various attack vectors in more advanced methods to penetrate organizational IT infrastructures. Educating yourself on arising threats can solidify your defenses. Investing in an organizational threat intelligence solution for can protect your assets and data. In addition to a steady supply of threat information to improve your defenses, analyzing the threats in relation to your organization and processes can be more effective.

How Essential is Threat Intelligence?

When adequately managed, Threat Intelligence is essential in saving your organization’s money and time while identifying and preventing cyberattacks. It also helps discover system and infrastructure breaches and anomalies. The benefits include the following:

Faster Reaction Time

When a threat enters an environment, it usually has one to two weeks of lead time before it exploits new vulnerabilities within the system. Subsequently, a security team only has days at most to eliminate a threat before it opens up new boundaries for it to attack. Studies show that organizations that are using threat intelligence identify threats ten times faster than those who do not.

Increased Staff Productivity

Security breaches result in unplanned, last-minute updating and downtimes. Handling threats even before they become critical is essential in increasing your staff productivity as well as your overhead cost. When you have a proper threat intelligence management, these will be eliminated.

Elimination of unnecessary expenses from a security breach

Data breaches can be expensive when not resolved immediately. With the credit card information, birthdays, and essential personal information that you have stored, one breach can result in mountains of fines and payments. Threat Intelligence management reduces this risk and ensures you save money in the long run.

Threat Intelligence Production

Usually, Threat Intelligence is derived from raw sources as threat data feeds. However, these feeds are often similar information and sorting them to suit our organization is laborious for analysts.  What is critical is that we should know which data feeds to draw from and gauge its usefulness to our system. Another sign of a good Threat Intelligence solution is the ability to automate the sorting process, which allows analysts to research a specific area quickly. A diverse source of data is also essential in producing a good Threat Intelligence landscape. Data should not be limited to public threat data feeds, but also from social media, technical sources, and even dark web forums.

Managing Threat Intelligence Production

The key to Threat Intelligence is not how much data you have, but what you do with that data that is critical. Managing the data that you have is the real gauge if you’re Threat Intelligence solution is robust enough to withstand impending cyber-attacks. Think of a perfect security defense as a destination. The raw data you have gathered will sketch out the map, but the Threat Intelligence will give it context. It will show you the way to your destination using the map.  

Sharing Threat Intelligence Production

While having those undifferentiated, unsorted data organized for an analyst to work on easily is a good start, it will prove to be a useless threat intelligence if it is not “actionable.” Here are the key elements that an actionable threat intelligence should have:

  • Timeliness – Time is of the essence especially for an impending attack. The Threat Intelligence should tip you in advance before the attack happens so that your security defenses would be prepared to combat the cyberattack.
  • Contextual – Threat Intelligence should be customized for your system. It should be personalized. No use worrying about threats that won’t affect your organization.
  • Coherency – The most critical element for a threat intelligence is to be actionable. It should be easily understandable by the person authorized to take action. If the threat warning about the organization’s breach of security defenses lands in the wrong hands, he might not understand the urgency and will not act swiftly to resolve the issue.

Threat Intelligence management is a diverse process aimed to achieve an accurate, comprehensive understanding of potential cybersecurity breaches. It has various applications that are in reality even more than what one organization can use effectively. The key is to decide which applications you need. Start by understanding how your organization works to come up with a list of applications you need. Eliminate what you do not need and focus on what remains.

About IBSS
Since 1992, IBSS has provided specialized professional and technical, cybersecurity, IT, and software engineering solutions to the Federal sector. Our clients include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). We are committed to serving our clients and employees by delivering service excellence, creating value through technology, and continually improving our skills, services, and processes. Moreover, we maintain an ISO 9001:2015 certification which allows us to optimize current industry best practices to enhance delivery outcomes for our clients.