Governments and the general people are increasingly being the targets of criminal and state-sponsored hacking groups. As demonstrated by recent breaches at the Royal Mail, the Danish central bank, and government contractor Capita, any organization can be a target. As a result, security personnel must be on continual alert to safeguard their own interests.
It should come as no surprise that security measures should focus on the fundamentals at a minimum. However, combining threat intelligence and applying it effectively while implementing these preventative actions helps advance an organization’s security posture. As evidenced in the immediate wake of the SolarWinds attack, where information was quickly disseminated to inform organizations of the extent of their exposure, the data it provides can be invaluable. But some issues need to be resolved before organizations can effectively use threat intelligence to fend off threat actors.
Mitigating risks in a changing threat environment
Threat intelligence can lower risk by preventing well-known signs of compromise when appropriately handled. At the organizational level, firewalls and web filtering services are helpful, but they need more in what they can accomplish. More robust solutions, like Protective DNS services, could offer that confidence and insight that ensures organizations are defended but also have the information they need to detect and respond if you want to have the assurance of protection at scale and to gather crucial threat intelligence from data.
National cyber authorities distributing threat intelligence to the general public include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the US and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the UK. These organizations share information on IoCs and APTs behind the scenes with partners and give regular updates and urgent alerts to warn of threat actor actions and vulnerabilities that have been exploited. Organizations are responsible for paying attention to these alerts when they are given and promptly incorporating this information into their own security systems to make sure they are current. When threat information from an organization’s internal data is paired with external data sources and insights to understand its own threat environment, it helps create a picture of the top risks to implement appropriate mitigations.
Recognizing the problem
Threat feeds are often associated with threat intelligence, a data stream of varying quality. To use threat intelligence effectively, one must clearly grasp the organization’s intelligence objectives because those feeds could not be pertinent to that organization’s industry, geographic location, or threat model. The fact that this is frequently a multi-stakeholder choice is one frequent problem. This can cause a bottleneck in specific organizations, while the relevant stakeholders in other organizations might need to be sufficiently educated about the security landscape to make a wise choice.
It is challenging to effectively craft a cyber plan capable of thwarting those threats if the key personnel of an organization is only partially aware of the potential security concerns. An organization runs the danger of losing effectiveness across the board regarding cyber defense rather than becoming an expert in the areas offering the most significant threats by failing to prioritize the right threats and trying to defend against everything at a time. Staying current on the danger landscape is simple by reading the most recent threat reports and briefings. An excellent strategy to get everyone on the same page is to conduct routine threat assessments as an organization and analyze the results. As threat actors frequently target many organizations within the same industry using identical strategies, collaboration and information exchange with industry peers can also greatly assist in remaining on the front foot.
Managing information overflow
Finding the correct data to achieve the goals comes next after the plans have been understood. A threat intelligence team’s most prominent foes are frequently too much or poor-quality data. Incident response teams often become overburdened with no means to prioritize the alerts generated by such intelligence, resulting in some signals being ignored. To prevent information overload, categorization is necessary in this situation. To get around this, reaching a consensus on intelligence objectives and locating threat intelligence sources that align with those objectives is critical.
Organizations should evaluate their data and only bring high-quality data that aligns with their objectives. Additionally, they can decide to filter only to raise warnings for particular indicators or threats that correspond to their most significant risks. Other alarms can still be documented, but organizations can lessen the danger of information overload by ensuring security staff concentrate on the greatest threats. Cybersecurity solutions like Security Information Event Management (SIEM) can be beneficial when used correctly. Still, if they are misused or not managed effectively, they can become another burden that makes it impossible to separate the noise from the actual risks.
Threat actors are constantly improving their strategies, and threat intelligence is a crucial tool for helping organizations stay one step ahead of them. Threat intelligence is becoming increasingly essential for security teams to use if they want the best strategy for securing their systems as long as cyberattacks continue to grab headlines. When implementing threat intelligence properly, organizations should concentrate on several factors, including quickly noting and acting upon threat warnings, fully comprehending the threats, and sorting through the abundance of data to use the most pertinent information. No matter the strategy, staying current on the threat landscape is critical because hackers’ choice of targets keeps getting more sophisticated.
