The first segment of this series highlighted anomaly detection and behavioral analytics for an early warning system regarding suspicious activities. But it is very important for mature adversaries for security teams to have tools in an arsenal to maintain the front-foot position.
Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) integrated in XDR will give valuable external intelligence, whether through real-time feeds of threats or adversarial tactics and behaviors, giving XDR a thrust that can then be drawn upon native capabilities. Such teams can be able to:
- Quickly identify adversarial tactics, then trail them
- Streamline their processes for the investigation of incidents and containing them
- Proactively hunt for new threats using this shared pool of intelligence
In this article, we will delve into what TIPs do to elevate XDR toward more streamlined threat hunting, automated incident response, and greater collaboration: an intelligence-driven approach to cybersecurity that supports both reactive and proactive measures.
What is The Role of Threat Intelligence in Advanced Threat Hunting with XDR?
Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) are powerful aggregators and analyzers of real-time intelligence feeds from global sources, such as malware databases, industry groups, and security vendors.
TIPs enrich internal threat-hunting data by providing up-to-date, contextualized information on emerging adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
When integrated with Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions, TIPs allow threat hunters to understand the “who,” “why,” and “how” behind a given threat, enhancing threat visibility and analytics across the entire network.
This synergy supports Security Operations Centers (SOC) and manage detection and response teams in identifying threats faster, leading to improved investigation and response times.
Key Benefits of TIPs in XDR Threat Hunting
Example of Enhanced Threat Hunting
Imagine a threat hunter detects anomalous traffic from an internal endpoint to an IP address that hasn’t been seen before. By querying the TIP, the threat hunter identifies the IP as part of a known botnet. Armed with this intelligence, the hunter can immediately escalate the incident, shifting from XDR threat investigation to containment. Without TIP integration, this could have been an overlooked anomaly instead of a confirmed threat, saving valuable time and resources. With the additional support of TIPs, endpoint detection and response tools and XDR work together to strengthen overall incident handling.
How to Integrate TIPs for IoCs for Effective Threat Hunting?
Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) provide specific markers of malicious activity, like IP addresses, file hashes, or domain names. TIPs aggregate and continually update IoCs from
a variety of sources, which XDR can then correlate with internal activity for a faster, more accurate threat-hunting process. The process is also enhanced by XDR threat intelligence capabilities, which enable Security Operations Centers (SOC) to take prompt action based on concrete, actionable data points.
3 Best Practices for Using IoCs in XDR
Relevancy Filtering
Focus on high-confidence IoCs relevant to your industry to avoid alert fatigue.
Automated IoC Matching
Utilize SIEM integrations with TIPs and XDR to automatically cross-reference incoming data against known IoCs, improving detection and response XDR accuracy.
Expiration Policies
Ensure IoCs are updated regularly, as adversaries often rotate their infrastructure. Removing outdated IoCs reduces the risk of overlooking new attack vectors.
Example
A financial services firm notices unusual login patterns on its network. Cross-referencing these patterns with IoCs from a TIP, the team confirms that these IP addresses have been used in recent banking-targeted phishing campaigns. With this context, the threat hunters
can proceed to track, contain, and investigate further, addressing the attack before any data is compromised.
By leveraging XDR threat intelligence, the firm achieves both faster incident response times and a more thorough investigation process, minimizing exposure to security breaches.
How Can You Leverage TTPs for Proactive Hunting?
While IoCs indicate specific instances of malicious activity, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) describe how adversaries operate, offering insights into broader attacker behavior.
TIPs continuously update threat-hunting teams on TTPs used in recent campaigns, helping them shift from reactive to proactive detection strategies. This approach enables endpoint detection and response solutions to better detect sophisticated threats across cloud environments and other critical areas.
Using TTPs in XDR to Strengthen Hunts
Cross-Campaign Visibility
TIPs identify common TTPs used by attackers across campaigns, providing visibility into recurring attack methods. This continuous visibility supports security operations centers (SOC) in anticipating and responding to these tactics effectively.
Adversary Profiling
TIPs build profiles around known threat actors, allowing hunters to anticipate future attacks based on past behaviors, enhancing the organization’s overall security solution.
Integrating MITRE ATT&CK
TIPs that align with the MITRE ATT&CK framework allow threat hunters to focus their hunts on ATT&CK techniques that specific adversaries frequently use. By doing so, teams ensure their strategies are proactive and highly targeted.
Example of TTP-Based Hunting
Consider a TIP that reports a known APT group leveraging fileless malware techniques, using PowerShell scripts and in-memory execution to evade detection.
Armed with this knowledge, a threat hunter can concentrate on identifying abnormal PowerShell activity, such as unauthorized scripts or process injections, which traditional IoCs might miss.
This approach enables them to detect sophisticated malware even without a specific artifact to search for, achieving a proactive stance on security events and security breach prevention.
How Can Businesses Automate Threat Hunting with TIPs?
With automation capabilities, TIPs enhance XDR’s efficiency in detecting, investigating, and responding to threats. Automation not only saves time but also allows threat hunters to focus on more complex threats rather than repetitive, manual tasks.
This automation is crucial for managed detection and response teams, as it strengthens overall security solution resilience against a wide range of potential threats.
3 Key Use Cases of TIP Automation in XDR
Automated Data Enrichment
TIPs can enrich suspicious data (like IPs or hashes) in real time, saving analysts from manual research and speeding up detection.
Hunting Playbooks
TIPs often come with predefined hunting playbooks that XDR can integrate with SOAR platforms. These playbooks automate threat hunts triggered by IoCs or TTPs.
Continuous Threat Monitoring
TIPs provide ongoing intelligence monitoring, which XDR uses to trigger alerts when newly detected IoCs or TTPs match internal data, allowing SOC teams to continuously monitor and act on evolving threat intelligence.
Example of Automated Response
An internal alert flags an unusual domain of communication. The TIP correlates it with an active phishing campaign, and an automated XDR response isolates the affected endpoint and notifies the team for follow-up. This automation shortens investigation and response times, reducing the potential damage from a security breach and improving overall incident handling.
Threat Intelligence and XDR Enhancing Incident Response
Incident Response (IR) is an integral component of any strong cybersecurity strategy. Detection and analysis, incident response procedures, and controls constitute its core. Integrating TIPs with XDR solutions can significantly enhance the incident response and detection capabilities of organizations, leading to faster response times and proactive threat management.
Role of TIPs in XDR Incident Response
TIPs are significant as they provide context and intelligence to support organizational decision-making when handling detection and analysis within an incident response process.
Some key roles of TIPs in XDR-driven incident responses are as follows:
1. Context-Driven Detection and Analysis
Historical and contextual threat intelligence is available via TIPs to provide enrichments when XDR generates incident response controls and procedures, thereby correlated anomalies produced in detection with other known threats. This helps to reduce their false positive; therefore, reducing false positive incidents in any detection is facilitated through improving accuracy levels for the associated processes for rapid incident detection and responses.
2. Quick incident response
TIPs contain actionable such as IoCs and TTPs, which aid organizations in rapidly responding to incidents. By enriching IoCs and TTPs with threat intelligence, analysts can rapidly determine the scope and potential impact of an incident. This accelerates threat detection and incident response, minimizing the dwell time of an attacker within the environment.
3. Automated Incident Response Playbooks:
TIPs can also integrate with the SOAR feature in XDR to make possible automation in response to incident actions. Some specified threat intelligence may automatically launch playbooks and then start pre-defined actions, which could include blocking malicious IPs, putting infected endpoints into quarantine, or sending out alerts to security teams. Such automation makes the processes involved in detecting and analyzing incident responses much more efficient while also reducing human errors.
An organization might notice peculiar network traffic on an essential server. XDR calls for this as a suspected attack, but its intensity can’t be said without knowing how to react without having related information.
- Enrich the Alert: the correlation with known patterns occurs as a ransomware attack.
- Accelerate Investigation: TIPs contain specific IoCs and TTPs related to ransomware, which will enable analysts to investigate the infected systems and compromised data in a quick manner.
- Automate Response: Threat intelligence can trigger predefined automated response playbooks that will isolate infected systems, block malicious IPs, and initiate incident response procedures and controls.
Collaboration and Threat Sharing for Collective Defense
Threat intelligence sharing allows for collaborative defense strategies that boost resilience against common adversaries. TIPs support data sharing through ISACs (Information Sharing and Analysis Centers) and STIX/TAXII protocols, enabling structured, secure collaboration. By combining XDR capabilities with TIP-enabled threat-sharing, organizations create a robust, collective defense that’s more effective at detecting and mitigating shared threats.
Fidelis Elevate® Unleashes Threat Intelligence Power to Leverage Advanced Threat Hunting and Incident Response
It is only by the incorporation of TIPs with XDR tools that security teams can stay ahead of the rapidly changing cyber threats today. TIPs bring in critical external context such as IoCs and TTPs that makes the threat hunting effective, and incident response much faster.
Feeding this intelligence directly into an XDR platform allows for more precise detection of threats, faster identification of advanced adversaries, and a streamlined incident response process.
However, for that to be really effective, an organization needs something more-an answer that not only supports but optimizes threat intelligence in the security stack. Fidelis Elevate excels at this.
Fidelis Elevate® is a next-generation XDR platform that integrates with TIPs in a thoroughly unified manner, providing for an integrated security ecosystem where network, endpoint, and cloud visibility connect. Therefore, with Fidelis Elevate®, security teams can use real-time actionable intelligence to:
- Enhanced Threat Detection: Fidelis Elevate® automatically integrates external threat intelligence with internal data so that IoCs, TTPs, and anomalies in all vectors of the network are correlated, thus improving the accuracy of threat detection.
- Reduce Incident Response: With high-end automated response capabilities, Fidelis Elevate® reduces TTD and TTR so that incidents are contained in short periods of time and mitigated before they become big issues.
- Improve Threat Hunting: Fidelis Elevate® empowers threat hunters to proactively hunt even the most elusive attackers through continuous, real-time data feeds and incorporates threat intelligence into the hunt using enriched context and precise threat analytics.
- Streamline Security Operations: Automation and integration help reduce the complexity of managing multiple security tools, thus making it possible to handle the threat detection and response process in a more efficient and coordinated manner.
The cyber threat landscape is changing really fast today. Simply reacting to that fast-moving and ever-changing cybersecurity arena today is not enough. Rather, what one needs here is proactive, intelligence-driven defense. Fidelis Elevate® removes all
guesswork about threat hunting and incident response by embedding real-time threat intelligence into every aspect of security operations.
Are you ready to elevate your cybersecurity operations?
See the power of Fidelis Elevate® in threat detection, hunting, and incident response. Schedule a demo today to learn how Fidelis Elevate® integrates perfectly with threat intelligence to put you at an advantage over sophisticated cyber threats.
Frequently Ask Questions
How does threat intelligence help in threat hunting with XDR?
Threat intelligence gives context through real-time insights into the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of adversaries. When threat intelligence is combined with XDR, security teams can proactively identify attack patterns, detect emerging threats, and correlate known Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) with internal data, enhancing overall threat detection and response capabilities.
Why is threat intelligence critical for incident response with XDR?
Threat intelligence is also vital in incident response since it provides real-time information about active threats, allowing security teams to immediately identify, investigate, and neutralize such attacks. With the help of external information and XDR, incident response teams may assess suspicious activity, prioritize threats, and thereby shorten the time to contain and remediate problems, resulting in faster response times and less damage.
How do enterprises integrate threat intelligence into their XDR platforms?
Threat intelligence streams can be easily linked into the XDR platform by utilizing TIPs to feed external intelligence into the system. This integration would enable security teams to correlate internal alerts with external IoCs and TTPs, automate threat detection, and exchange intelligence across teams, thereby improving both threat hunting and incident response.
How can threat hunting and incident response help with cybersecurity detection and analysis?
Threat hunting and incident response are critical components of an XDR architecture that improves detection and analysis. Threat hunting is proactive; it seeks out hidden or emergent dangers, whereas incident response provides a structured method for analyzing and mitigating incidents. So, these two enhance event detection and reaction. It enables security teams to swiftly identify and mitigate possible attacks by leveraging threat information, which provides context to warnings and streamlines response activities.
