Cyber Threat Intelligence definition
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) can be defined as “contextually enriched information concerning actors, specific threats, and vulnerabilities presented to enhance the decision-making process and heighten the consumer’s security posture.” This enriched information is the result of planning, collection, analysis, and dissemination leading to greater situational awareness and the integration of countermeasures.
“Threat intelligence cyber security is evidence-based knowledge (e.g., context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and action-oriented advice) about existing or emerging menaces or hazards to assets.”
- Perform situation development: Provisioning of intelligence to support a greater understanding of the threat landscape.
- Support in protecting an organization and its assets: Utilize the understanding of the threat landscape to determine pending threats to the organization and create the appropriate countermeasures.
- Provide Indications and Warnings (I&W): To identify and prevent vulnerabilities from being exploited, as well as informing on potential or pending attacks.
Why is Cyber Threat Intelligence Important?
The importance of cyber threat intelligence lies in its ability to be consumed by all teams within a security program, as well as many security solutions. Without actionable and contextualized CTI, security teams will be making best guesses and assumptions instead of intelligence-based decisions.
The threat intelligence process is important as:
- clarifies the unknown, so helping security teams to make better decisions.
- exposes enemy motives and their methods, approaches, and practices (TTPs) so empowering cyber security stakeholders.
- assists security experts in gaining a deeper comprehension of the threat actor's decision-making procedure.
- empowers corporate stakeholders including executive boards, CISOs, CIOs, CTOs; to invest wisely, reduce risk, become more efficient and make quick choices.
Who Benefits from Threat Intelligence: Threat Intelligence Use Cases
| Function | Use Cases |
|---|---|
| Sec/IT Analyst |
|
| SOC (Security Operations Center) |
|
| CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Team) |
|
| Intel Analyst |
|
| Executive Management |
|
3 Types of Threat Intelligence You need Know
1. Tactical Threat Intelligence
Problem: Threats are treated as a separate individual problem
Objective: Develop holistic view with a threat perspective to treat the root cause.
Tactical intelligence covers the near term, technical, and is looking for simple indicators of compromise (IOCs). IOCs are things like bad IP addresses, URLs, file hashes, and known malicious domain names. It can be interpreted by machines, allowing security solutions to consume it via feeds or API integration.
Tactical intelligence is by far the easiest type of intelligence to produce; it’s also nearly always automated. So, tactical intelligence can be sourced from open-source and free threat intelligence data feeds but is often incredibly ephemeral because IOCs such as malicious IPs or domain names quickly become outdated in days, and sometimes even hours.
Subscribing to intel feeds could in itself be sufficient for generating enough data, but it offers very little in ways of processing and effectively strategizing the threats of interest. Worse still are false positives when the source is neither timely nor of high fidelity.
2. Operational Threat Intelligence
Problem: Threat actors tend to use techniques that are effective, opportunistic, and low risk
Objective: Track campaigns and actor profile to better understand the adversaries behind the attacks
- Behind every attack is a "who," "why," and "how."
- Attribution is the "who."
- Motivation or intent is the "why."
- The "how" consists of the TTPs used by the threat actor.
Together, these provide insight into how adversaries plan, conduct, and sustain campaigns and major operations. This insight is operational intelligence.
Threat intelligence cannot be created in a vacuum with machines only. Data needs to be converted into an usable form by human analysis for customers. Operational intelligence is at a larger resource requirement than tactical intelligence, yet its useful lifetime is longer, because attackers can’t change their TTPs easily compared to their tools – such as a specific type of malware or infrastructure.
Operational intelligence is most beneficial to the security professional who works within the SOC and performs its day-to-day operations. Among all cybersecurity disciplines, vulnerability management, incident response, and threat monitoring use the most operational intelligence. This intelligence helps them perform better and be more effective in their roles.
3. Strategic Threat Intelligence
Problem: Wrong framing of the threat actor leads to flawed organizational and business decisions
Objective: Inform business decisions-and the processes that underlie business decisions-through threat intelligence
Attackers don’t operate in a vacuum-higher-level factors almost always surround the execution of cyber-attacks. Nation-state attack surface, for example, are typically associated with geopolitical conditions themselves risk associated. Big Game Hunting by financially motivated cyber-crime groups is being adopted and their techniques change continually and therefore should not be disregarded.
It describes the way global events, foreign policies, and other long-term local or international movements can potentially affect an organization’s cyber security.
Strategic intelligence helps decision-makers understand the risks that cyber threats pose to their organizations. With this knowledge, they can make smart cybersecurity investments. These investments will protect their organizations and align with their strategic priorities.
This is the most challenging form of generation. Human data gathering and analysis for strategic intelligence are required, providing an intimate understanding of both cybersecurity and the nuances surrounding the geopolitical situation of the world. Strategic intelligence is usually presented in report form.
Must-Have Threat Hunting Checklist by Fidelis
What’s Inside:
- Hunting processes
- Platform best practices
- Actionable steps
- Threat detection
What are the Sources of Threat Intelligence?
- Internal Data: Info from network logs, incident responses, and internal data gathering.
- Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT): Publicly available information from various resources.
- Closed-Source Services: Restricted information not accessible to the public.
- Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs): Sector-specific groups sharing actionable threat intelligence.
- Government Advisories: Alerts and updates from sources including the FBI, NCSC, and ENISA.
- Deep and Dark Web Intelligence: Encrypted threat intelligence data revealing cybercrime activities and insights into criminal motives.
How to Implement Cyber Threat Intelligence
There are three steps which help in implementing cyber threat intelligence effectively: First, relevant cyber threat information is collected from numerous sources along with data breaches. The output of this analysis is processed with utmost care using the essential technologies and techniques in use. This further leads to the information being passed on to the appropriate stakeholders for further robust security measures and future prevention of cybersecurity threats.
7 Thumb Rules to implement a Cyber Threat Intelligence Program
Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) include harmful IP addresses, suspicious URLs, file hashes, and recognized malicious domains. They can be formatted for machines, allowing security tools to receive them via feeds or API connections.
Create a Plan
Identify and develop a broad strategy for more advanced persistent threats and other emerging threats.
Engage the Right People
The best people are “on program” to influence good security decisions.
Distinguish Threat Data from Threat Intelligence
Learn how to exploit Threat Intelligence solutions to develop actionable insights instead of raw data.
Facilitate Communication
Ensure there is clear access and sharing of intelligence with all parties involved.
Identify Who Needs the Intelligence
Identify all relevant stakeholders who need Threat Intelligence for effective risk management.
Operate with the right tools, techniques and procedures
Use appropriate tools and techniques that would enhance your threat intelligence capabilities.
Integrate into Security Technology
Threat Intelligence should be part of an organization’s security infrastructure to gain the maximum effect.
What Are the Cyber Threat Intelligence Lifecycle
Understanding the Cycles of the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle
The cyber threat intelligence cycle can be broken into several critical phases that take raw data and transform it into actionable cybersecurity intelligence. The following gives a very brief description of each phase and how organizations lead the market in the ever-changing cyber threat landscape.
1. Discovery: Finding the Data
Using the discovery phase, you will obtain critical data in the terms of threat intelligence. You could have your indicators of compromise (IOCs), adversary tactics, malicious tools, and techniques-in other words, all of the above. All this is gathered from internal investigations, external threat feed intelligence sources, partners, and OSINT or open-source intelligence.
2. Collection: Gathering What Matters
Once the required data is identified, it is now time to collect and store it. This step entails collecting relevant cyber threat intelligence data for the subsequent stage of analyses to take place. Therefore, the data collected may have a higher chance of being in the right format if it were collected into a centralized repository or a threat intelligence platform.
3. Processing: Preparing the Data
This data is usually duplicative, inconsistent, or irrelevant. In this processing stage, information cleaning during the processing process makes data useful. After filtering out redundant information, the data is formatted, and enriched with added metadata and context, and now is ready for analysis. Of all the processes involved in threat intelligence, this is the most important because it filters out only valuable and refined information to further process.
4. Analysis: Data Processing /Transformation to Insights
The analysis phase provides a thorough scrubbing of the cleaned data set. It is during this phase when patterns, trends, and potential threats start to surface. At this stage, there are numerous techniques used to drill down and expose hidden insights buried within the data. Analysts should therefore attempt to gauge whether it is credible, the severity, and what implications may occur to the respective identified threats. In the Threat Intelligence life cycle, raw data gets translated into meaningful, actionable intelligence.
5. Action: Putting Intelligence to Work
Once the analysis is done, it is time for disseminating intelligence to stakeholders. Actionable intelligence is passed on to incident response teams, security operations centers, and company executives. The message needs to be suitable for the targeted audience; therefore, it has to be well-defined, short, and appropriate. This stage is good for organizations to take proper measures within time so that the threats before them do not grow into crises.
6. Feedback Loop: Always Improving
The last step in the cycle for cyber threat intelligence is gathering feedback from all stakeholders, so it will refine and enhance the process. That way, feedback ensures that the threat intelligence provided is relevant, effective, and continually being improved with lessons learned. This feedback loop improves on the collection, processing, and analysis phases, which makes this entire lifecycle more efficient and valuable over time.
The idea behind each phase of a threat intelligence lifecycle would be the understanding and implementation, hence moving the organizations to stay ahead in terms of emerging threats and strengthen their overall posture.
What Organizations are Getting Wrong about Cyber Threat Intelligence?
Many organizations miss the mark when it comes to threat intelligence. Often, cybersecurity teams fail to present findings effectively, leading to confusion instead of clarity. It’s vital to connect potential attacks to real business risks, showing how addressing these threats can enhance the bottom line.
Another common error is selecting the wrong threat intelligence platform. With countless options, it’s easy to choose one that doesn’t fit your needs. Understanding your unique infrastructure is crucial, especially when dealing with sensitive personal data.
To improve your defenses, leverage threat intelligence and vulnerability management. Solutions like Fidelis Elevate® harness insights from the Fidelis Threat Research Team (TRT), equipping your security operations center (SOC) with actionable data. This approach allows organizations to tackle vulnerability threat intelligence effectively and stay ahead of emerging threats.
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