What Is Cyber Threat Intelligence? And Why You Should Care
In a world currently built on digital technologies, it’s hard not to think about the vulnerabilities that threaten us every step of the way. With that in mind, in this article, we will focus on online threat intelligence and discuss the ways to mitigate harmful events in cyberspace.
The global economy, institutions, and technology at large have indeed all changed due to the new digital tools that have simplified human life. However, these massive technological leaps have increased our vulnerability against cyber-attacks.
Thankfully, professionals in the field are already developing strategic solutions to address pressing issues like this.
This is how cyber vulnerability management came to be, with more and more intelligence analysts looking at important data to find the best solutions for the crisis at hand. To be precise, we’re talking about threat intelligence, a topic on which we’ll expand on in this article.
What Are The Challenges Faced By The Cybersecurity Industry?
The cybersecurity industry needs to overcome more and more challenges each coming year, with threats becoming more devious, persistent, and merciless with data flooding all information systems across the board.
As if this wasn’t enough, it’s important to remember that this data is unfiltered, so plenty of it is useless or even triggering alarms for no real reason, leading to burdening the analytical teams beyond their capabilities.
Since many of these data systems are still improperly or insufficiently connected, and tech-savvy professionals are still a rare find, the cybersecurity industry is constantly guarding itself against emerging threats.
This is where threat intelligence comes in and saves the day. But before going into details, let’s overview the main types of cyber threat intelligence attacks to better understand what these are.
With so many menaces casting a shadow over our digital life, our security can increase only if we learn and adopt the necessary solutions while they’re still in the bud.
What Is Threat Intelligence?
Cybersecurity does not only concern organizations or the top IT brains in the world. In fact, it should be a day-to-day concern and a topic of interest for everyone, as it’s the stepping stone for tomorrow’s technological advancements.
Even though it may seem like a cybersecurity field reserved for the elite, threat intelligence is easy to understand and virtually useful for anyone nowadays.
To delve deeper into this, threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge, including mechanisms, implications, indicators, and actionable advice businesses can implement to prevent or mitigate existing or emerging cyber threats.
Who Can Benefit From Cyber Threat Intelligence?
In this day and time? Anyone and everyone!
Even though it may have a pompous name, threat intelligence is pretty much the most basic and important cog in the cybersecurity machine we’ve all had personal or professional events linked to.
Moreover, cyber threat intelligence is integral to many organizations’ flourishing, adding tremendous value to operations while successfully mitigating risks.
A cyber incident can happen at any time. Companies should know how to process the threat information correctly and in due time to avoid further unwanted complications down the line. Detection and response should be, in these cases, flawless for the companies to continue thriving as if nothing of real negative impact happened.
The Lifecycle Of Threat Intelligence
But how did threat intelligence even come to be? It couldn’t have appeared out of nowhere, could it?
What’s important to remember is that threat intelligence has a life cycle of its own and that it’s a finished product stemming as a result of an arduous six-part cycle.
So let’s take a look at what these parts are:
1. Planning And Direction
This intelligence cycle starts by asking the right questions because what you want is laser-focused answers that address one very specific issue. But perhaps the most important thing to ponder during this part of the process is who will process the finished result. The intelligence to be exact.
2. Collecting Raw Data
Collecting raw data is closely linked to the first part of the threat intelligence cycle. It’s advised that raw data is best collected from multiple and varied sources such as the dark web, the open web, and technical sources.
Threat data will include things like malicious domains, file hashes, IP addresses, and vulnerability information.
3. Processing
Collecting raw data is not enough. Processing it is the key here as this data needs to be sorted out, removing the redundant bits of information.
Unfortunately, the sheer amount of data is so large that it cannot be processed by humans. However, it can be successfully automated through threat intelligence which offers a series of solutions that can untangle these very complicated situations.
4. Analysis
Once data collection is completed, what needs to be done is to analyze it and make sense of it. During the analysis stage of the process, potential issues are identified and then communicated to the appropriate team, so tactical decisions can be made.
5. Dissemination
This is when the finished product is sent to reach its intended consumers — this is the only way in which we can actually talk about actionable intelligence. Threat data simply needs to reach the right people, so further steps can be made to avoid or mitigate cybersecurity risk.
6. Final Feedback
Lastly, those that made the initial requests during the first step of this cycle must review this data and its analyzed version to decide if their questions have been answered.
This lays the foundation for the next threat intelligence cycle to begin and ensures continuity all throughout.
What Are The Types Of Threat Intelligence?
At the end of the day, there’s a fine science behind online threat intelligence too, so it’s important to remember there are more easily distinguishable types out there;
- Strategic Intelligence – This type of intelligence speaks more about broader trends mainly meant for non-technical audiences.
- Tactical Intelligence – Tactical intelligence provides outlines of the tactics, procedures, and techniques of threat actors. Aimed at a more tech-savvy audience.
- Operational Intelligence – This type of intelligence involves detailed technical knowledge of campaigns and attacks.
What Is the Future Of Cyber Threat Intelligence?
Now that we’ve gone through the basics of threat intelligence, we can safely say we’re able to grasp the notion of it a little better. However, what does all this information indicate about its future?
What we can tell you is that data processing can be a huge undertaking, well beyond manual processing capabilities. This is why it’s our opinion that data learning is the future, and that automation is there to support help in many ways:
- To better structure data into events and entities.
- To help structure text in more languages through organic language processing.
- It will help human analysts better comprehend priority levels for alerts.
- It will assist forecast events through predictive models.
This is how threat intelligence can truly evolve in the future and stand as the basis for increased cybersecurity for generations to come.
How To Protect Yourself From Cyber Threat Intelligence Attacks?
In case you didn’t notice, the world wide web can look pretty dark, regardless if you’re an individual or a company interested in keeping its operational processes smooth at all times.
This is why we, at InternetPrivacy.com, offer you active internet protection that works.
We’ll help you increase your online privacy and safety by removing all personal information that you don’t want to ever exist online on websites like Nuwber. Without such information available online, the risk of cyber-attacks becomes virtually zero.
If you want to not worry about any malware, data breaches, or vicious attacks on your personal and/or business online information, simply reach out to us, and we’ll offer you the top support you need!
If you found this article on threat intelligence useful, you might also enjoy:
