With cybersecurity infrastructure being more complex and comprehensive than ever before, we need an equally comprehensive way to understand and interpret the effectiveness of our security tools, and their vulnerabilities. This is cyber threat intelligence, or “CTI”.
CTI will produce a number of actionable insights that help you make informed decisions regarding your cybersecurity infrastructure. It can help identify vulnerabilities and suggest remediation methods. It can anticipate the behavior of an attacker based on indicators of compromise (IOCs), hashes, and other analysis. It is highly configurable and can therefore provide intelligence on all aspects of your cybersecurity infrastructure.
Due to CTIs specificity, the results of cyber threat intelligence vary greatly between organizations, and even for different audiences within a single organization. Data is analyzed and formatted to produce highly specific intelligence that can be used to answer a specific question, contextualized for a specific target audience.
But how exactly can you produce cyber threat intelligence, and how can it help your business?
Who Is Cyber Threat Intelligence For?
Essentially, CTI is for anyone who has a vested interest in the cybersecurity infrastructure of an organization. Part of the process for gathering CTI is defining who the information is for, and what questions need to be answered. As information is gathered in response to a question (rather than the other way around), this intelligence can be tailored to suit any audience. The nature of the output will depend on the audience’s level of technical knowledge and their responsibilities to manage remediation based on the findings. There are three broad classifications of intelligence:
Tactical intelligence informs specific remediation attempts. It is delivered in real time, and provides information regarding endpoints, IOC, attack behavior, and suggests the best course of action to remediate a threat.
Operational intelligence provides insights into how cyber security solutions are responding to threats. The managers who are responsible for this can tailor policies to ensure cybersecurity tools are effective.
Strategic intelligence is delivered to the main decision makers within an organization. This intelligence might include industry trends, vulnerability analysis for their own organization, and information on attacks to similar organizations. These executives can then plan the organization’s trajectory and decide if further cybersecurity investment is required.
What Is Intelligence?
Before investigating how CTI works, it is worth considering the difference between data, information, and intelligence. Although these may seem synonymous, they have very specific meanings.
Data is a raw, unprocessed piece of information. It is without context or analysis. An example of a datum (singular form of data) would be an IP address or a timestamp. On its own, this is not useful information – it is only when linked to additional information that it becomes useful.
Information is data that has been compiled and contextualized. It is formatted to answer a question – often in the form of a graph or a table to illustrate findings. Information can help to make sense of data, but it cannot make decisions – any predictions are based on historical trends.
Intelligence takes information a step further through processing and analyzing the information. This results in actionable insights that can be used to predict threats, motives, tactics, and behaviors. It can be used to make proactive strategic decisions.
How Does Cyber Threat Intelligence Work – The Threat Intelligence Lifecycle
When it comes to gathering cyber threat intelligence, you might hear the phrase: “cyber threat intelligence lifecycle”. This is used to outline the ongoing process for collecting, collating, analyzing, and presenting relevant information.
The timeframe for this lifecycle will differ depending on how urgent the information is, and who it is designed to advise. For example, strategic intelligence might only be presented quarterly, whilst tactical intelligence needs to be presented minute-by-minute to keep your organization safe.
There are six steps that inform how CTI is gathered and presented to relevant parties:
- Requirements
Your organization must decide what type of intelligence you intend to gather. You’ll need to consider who your stakeholders are, and what you would like the outcome of the analysis to be. You might want to explore an attack surface, understand assets, or decide how best to strengthen security implementation.
2. Collection
In this step, data is collected to answer the questions that the requirements demand (step 1). The nature of this data collection depends on the question. This might involve monitoring traffic logs, conducting interviews with experts, or extracting metadata from devices and internal networks. This stage will produce raw data that can be processed in step 3.
3. Processing
Once data has been collected, it will need to be processed and formatted to make it easier to analyze. To do this, data might need to be decrypted or decoupled from personally identifiable information (PII) or other information that is not relevant to the outcomes stated in step 1. This is also the stage where you can evaluate the data for relevance and reliability.
4. Analysis
This stage requires human intervention to make sense of the compiled data, and to identify trends and anomalies. You might perform statistical analysis to understand if threats are increasing or if response times have altered. In essence, this is the stage where you find the answers to the questions asked in step 1.
5. Dissemination
With data that has been processed, you need to be able to share it with relevant stakeholders. Key findings will need to be highlighted with suggestions of how threats can be remediated. In this stage, you will consider who the intelligence is for, and the level of detail that is required. You might need to reduce or explain jargon and tailor your findings for the relevant audience. This data might be distributed in a variety of ways – from an email to a presentation or hands-on demonstration.
5. Feedback
Once the intelligence has been collected and shared with relevant parties, the target audience needs to consider how they will act upon the findings. Again, the specific details of this action depend on the target audience and their role within the organization. Are they responsible for procuring new cybersecurity solutions, or for tailoring the policies of existing tools?
What Intelligence Does CTI Present?
The remit for CTI can be as broad or as specific as you decide. The level of detail, as well as the data collected, all depends on what questions you set out to ask, and who the answers are being reported to. This is decided in step 1 of the CTI lifecycle. Common areas analyzed as part of the CTI process include:
- Online brand intelligence
- Dark web monitoring
- Domain impersonation
- Social media impersonation and misuse
- Data breach identification
- Vulnerability intelligence and prioritization
There are several companies that offer CTI solutions to gather relevant data and process it to provide actionable intelligence. Many of these solutions will automatically remediate vulnerabilities to ensure your network is as secure as it can be. These solutions can also be used to:
- Validate findings
- Filter out false positives
- Removing anomalous, “noisy” data points
- Provide immediate, automated response
You can read more about the Top 10 Cyber Threat Intelligence Solutions here.
Benefits Of Cyber Threat Intelligence
Again, this is a very broad topic with the benefits depending on what you want to investigate with CTI. However, the most common benefits of carrying out cyber threat intelligence include:
Efficient Incident Response
CTI is sometimes described as a cybersecurity “roadmap” – it gives security teams an invaluable insight into how security implementation affects the network and guides them to where more work is needed.
This “roadmap” will ensure that remediation efforts can be quick and effective in light of a cyber-attack. The intelligence can identify where a security breach is likely to have happened, then predict the behavior of an attack, to put your response one step ahead of the attack.
Using CTI helps to identify where a security team should be directing their efforts. As they don’t have to work out which areas need to be focused on, they are able to use their time effectively and efficiently. They won’t spend expensive human time sifting through data that a machine can analyze much quicker. It also ensures that any new security implementation will be specific and targeted. This reduces the number of vulnerabilities within your organization, and helps to ensure you’re investing in the right areas the first time around.
Ultimately, CTI can help to improve efficiency by streamlining your cybersecurity response, thereby proving a good return on investment.
Ensure Compliance
With attacks becoming more sophisticated and complex, regulatory bodies are asking for more significant cybersecurity infrastructure. Regulatory frameworks – such as GDPR, SOX, HIPPA, etc – often mandate what security implementation they expect you to have in place. As part of this, effective CTI might be required to ensure your organization is alert to, and prepared for, attacks.
Insurance companies, too, will require you to have effective tools in place to protect your organization. Not only will CTI identify the effectiveness of your existing security set up, but it can also instruct you on where you can improve. If you follow these recommendations, some insurance providers will reduce your premiums.
Failure to implement CTI, or the recommendations made by CTI, could see your insurance cover invalidated, or result in fines and penalties from regulatory bodies.
For more information about how to qualify for cyber security insurance, you can read our comprehensive article here.
Inform Security Awareness Training (SAT)
The insights provided by CTI are not limited to tailoring policies or suggesting new security tool implementation; CTI can also highlight how your staff can become an important cybersecurity asset. When employees understand the benefits and the limits of a security tool, they are better placed to ensure success.
For example, if an employee understands the significance and the repercussions of a phishing email that has passed through a spam filter, they will be able to act appropriately. They know that a SEG (Secure Email Gateway) is not infallible and are therefore less likely to fall victim to this type of attack. The infromation gained through CTI can inform an SAT solution by highlighting where an organization’s vulnerabilities are. This ensures that users can spend their time completing the most relevant and valuable training.
By gathering information about your network, you can understand the threats you face, and ensure that employees are properly trained to further minimize the risks.
You can read our list of the Top Cybersecurity Awareness Training Solutions here.
Collaborative Knowledge
By sharing details gleaned from your CTI, you can ensure that organizations present a united front against cyberattacks. By improving security infrastructure across the board, you make it harder for attackers to succeed. There is, therefore, less incentive for hackers to pursue cyberattacks as a means of income, which reduces the likelihood of you becoming a target.
Sharing information about IOCs between organizations will allow you to identify these same indicators more readily, should your network be attacked. Beyond this, if your organization is attacked by a specific malware, another organization’s information regarding the remediation of that malware can be invaluable in managing your own remediation efforts. You will have access to information about how a threat responds once inside a network, and the best strategy for its removal.
Summary
Cyber threat intelligence is a vast topic that can help resolve any question you investigate. As such, there is not one simple solution that can provide CTI for your organization. It is worth thinking of CTI as a framework; a way of gathering information about your organization.
There are software solutions that can be configured to identify critical threats and vulnerabilities that your network faces. It is worth investigating these solutions more thoroughly, to ensure they explore the areas that you are interested in researching.
You can learn more about this on our list of the Top 10 Cyber Threat Intelligence Solutions.
