Why every company should include threat intelligence in their cybersecurity strategy
In the fast-evolving digital landscape, the prevalence of cyber threats has become a stark reality for businesses and individuals. While essential, conventional cybersecurity measures are often reactive and inadequate against sophisticated attacks. This is where Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) emerges as a proactive and complementary approach to cybersecurity.
Utilizing CTI helps organizations to protect their systems from potential hazards. It provides a way to cut through the noise and focus on threats relevant to that specific company and industry. However, CTI is more than just a product. It's a program that needs to be evaluated constantly to ensure the correct tools, processes, and people are being leveraged as threats evolve and the company changes over time.
Understand how Cyber Threat Intelligence can best leverage the capabilities of network detection and response
Intelligence is now considered essential to the process of identifying, understanding and acting upon threats. According to the "Global Perspectives on Threat Intelligence" study conducted by Mandiant, 96 percent of decision-makers interviewed for the research believe that it is important to understand which cyber threat actors could be targeting their organization. Consequently, threat Intelligence should be fully integrated into the internal mechanisms linked to threat detection and response.
Before detailing how intelligence can be integrated into defense tools, it is necessary to talk about the nature of intelligence, the complexity of collecting it, and how to curate, qualify and act on it in the most efficient way. Intelligence effectiveness depends on the contextualization of the elements collected in relation to a business’s specific environment. Once the qualified information is available and translated into specific formats and languages, it can then be used appropriately in detection tools, such as network detection probes, SIEMs, EDRs, etc.
Pandemic sees organizations of all sizes and industries invest in cyber threat intelligence (CTI)
After a year full of unknowns and new normals, knowledge is power. The spike in cyber breaches in the past year, compounded by COVID-related attacks, has only increased the importance of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) in the past year. The 2021 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey, sponsored by ThreatQuotient, explores the state of play in the global use of CTI and outlines why the difficulties of the past year have contributed to the continued growth and maturity of CTI.
The 2021 survey saw the number of respondents reporting they produce or consume intelligence rise by 7 percent, more notably, this was the first time the number of respondents without plans to consume or produce intelligence was 0 percent, down from 5.5 percent in 2020. Analyzed CTI helps organizations understand the capabilities, opportunities, and intent of adversaries conducting malicious cyber activities. In turn, this paints a picture about how threat actors are targeting an organization’s systems, information, and people. It is this contextual information that helps organizations and individuals respond to threats, understand risks, design better cyber defenses, and protect their organization.