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Effective Threat Intelligence Strategies for Enterprise Security

 
Sanjiv Cherian

Sanjiv Cherian, Cyber Security Director
Oct 04, 2024

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Threat intelligence has a deeper role to play in modern IT environments and cybersecurity.

Attackers constantly employ the latest techniques to infiltrate enterprise networks and hunt for vulnerabilities to exploit.

But if you’re still using basic security measures like firewalls and traditional incident detection and response mechanisms, it may not be enough to thwart attacks.

With threat intelligence, you can detect threats and vulnerabilities that may get through basic security systems so that you can fix them before they can harm your enterprise.

In this article, we’ll discuss what threat intelligence is and how it can enhance your enterprise’s security posture.


What Is Threat Intelligence?



Threat intelligence means collecting and analysing data on potential security threats to gain valuable insights. Enterprises utilise the insights to thoroughly investigate cyber threats and respond to them proactively with suitable countermeasures. This mitigates threats or reduces the impact of a cyberattack.

Using cyber threat intelligence, CISOs, CTOs, and other security professionals can find out the motives, tactics, and techniques of a threat actor. They can understand attack patterns, and predict potential threats in advance. This helps them stay one step ahead of threat actors by creating robust security strategies and making informed business decisions.

As a result, the enterprise security posture improves, which helps you uphold end-user trust and support business continuity.

Types of Threat Intelligence

Different types of threat intelligence are:

Technical: Technical threat intelligence investigates active attacks by looking for indicators of compromise (IoCs) like attack vectors, vulnerabilities, etc. It adjusts quickly to changes in attackers’ tactics and, thus, is more adaptable.

Tactical: Tactical threat intelligence finds out attackers’ techniques, tactics, and methodologies. It focuses on enterprise employees who manage data and IT environments to find potential risks and provides details on how to mitigate them.

Strategic: Strategic threat intelligence details potential cyberattacks and how they can affect business stakeholders and other non-technical audiences. It’s presented as white papers or reports after analysing cybersecurity risks and trends comprehensively.

Operational: Operational threat intelligence involves gathering data from multiple sources like historical events, social media, antivirus logs, etc. Security analysts use this information to predict future attacks and their nature. Similarly, incident response teams use this data to adjust their configurations, access controls, firewall rules, etc. It utilises modern techniques like data mining and machine learning.

Why Is Threat Intelligence Important for Enterprise Security?

Cyber threats are advancing. Attackers keep on finding new ways to infiltrate an organisation’s security. They constantly look for vulnerabilities in systems and how to exploit them using the latest techniques.

According to CheckPoint Research, organisations faced 1,636 attacks a week on average in Q2 2024, which represents a 30% increase in attacks year-over-year.

So, to strengthen your security posture and prevent cyber attacks, you need intel on emerging risks and attackers’ next move. This is what threat intelligence equips you with. Here, basic security measures like firewalls, access controls, antivirus software, etc. are not enough to fight against sophisticated attacks. Some of the benefits of threat intelligence in cybersecurity include the following:

  • Detecting unknown security issues and vulnerabilities
  • Making informed decisions on time
  • Prioritising security workflows
  • Effectively allocating suitable resources to counterattacks
  • Improving your incident response times and manage risks

This way, your organisation’s security posture improves and you become more resilient to attacks. It helps lower the likelihood of attacks or minimise an attack’s impact on your organisation. This means you don’t have to face losses in terms of your finances, customer trust, reputation, and regulatory compliance.

Threat Intelligence Lifecycle

Here’s a typical threat intelligence lifecycle:

Planning: This is where an organisation understands its security posture and requirements by defining objectives and all the assets connected to its network and overviewing current security measures. This helps plan out its threat intelligence roadmap and workflows.

Collect and process data: Threat intelligence team collects security-related raw data from different sources, such as threat feeds, logs, vulnerability reports, antivirus reports, etc. Next, they process this data, which includes steps like normalisation, structuring, and organising the data to make it easy for the team to extract valuable insights from it.

Analyse data: In this stage, the team analyses data to find patterns, threats, and risks along with their impacts. The threat intelligence team documents the analysis into understandable and actionable insights for decision-makers. It also includes creating proactive security strategies and rules for efficient threat detection and response.

Distribution: The threat intelligence team distributes the insights to stakeholders to make informed business decisions. It also involves prioritising threats based on their impacts or urgency, fixing issues, patching vulnerabilities, and more.

Seek feedback and iterate: In this stage, you seek feedback from stakeholders to understand how effective your threat intelligence process and response strategies are. Make adjustments based on the feedback to improve your processes.


How to Build an Effective Threat Intelligence Strategy



Now that you’ve some idea about threat intelligence and its importance, let’s find out how to build an effective threat intelligence strategy from scratch.

Set Threat Intelligence Objectives

Figure out why you need threat intelligence for your organisation.
Is your current security strategy not enough?

Are your response times longer?

Do you face frequent security risks?

Answers to questions like these help you set your objectives for implementing threat intelligence.

One of the best things about threat intelligence is it provides measurable results via metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics are - the number of incidents per month or quarter, mean time to detect/respond to threats, etc.

Thus, define all the results you wish to accomplish with threat intelligence based on your organisation’s specific needs and risk vectors. It will help you plan your cyber risk management strategies effectively, focusing on remediating real-world attacks.

Review Your SecOps Ecosystem

Before you create your threat intelligence strategy, review your current security environment and try to understand it in detail. Identify and evaluate all your assets, security operations, access permissions, procedures, tools, and teams to find risks and loopholes. You must also reassess your current threat detection and response strategies to find opportunities to improve.

These insights will help you determine the attack surface, the type of cyber threats you may encounter, and how much threat intelligence you need for remediation. While creating the plan, also take into account some additional factors, like business size, industry, and risk appetite.
This way, you can create a solid threat intelligence strategy for your business, covering all the assets and needs, and make data-driven decisions.


Choose Reliable Data Sources

You can collect data from various internal and external sources.
But is the data reliable?

If not, it won’t add any value to your security efforts. This is why you must collect data from reliable, genuine sources by verifying their authenticity. Apart from reliability, collect data that is relevant, complete, accurate, and consistent to ensure the highest data quality.

When gathering data, start internally first. Collect internal data from your organisation’s software systems, applications, network logs, antivirus tools, vulnerability reports, spam scores, documented incidents and responses, past attacks and their impacts, and more.

For example, if you have experienced phishing attacks before, review how the attack infiltrated affected your organisation and how you handled it and restored operations. Documenting this data will help you sharpen your security measures and prevent similar attacks.

Once you’ve collected internal data, start collecting external data to get better threat awareness. Extract threat intel from authoritative news websites, social media, blogs, research reports by security firms, whitepapers, online groups/forums, etc.

Using both internal and external data will provide you with comprehensive threat intelligence and get a bigger picture of threats and their impacts on your organisation.

Detect Threats Proactively


Advanced threats might get through basic security measures and remain undetected for days, weeks, or months. With time, these threats pump up sensitive data, gain unauthorised access, and spread to more systems. Subsequently, these turn into dreadful attacks like data breaches and ransomware attacks to damage your organisation significantly.

According to a Parachute study, downtimes due to ransomware attacks have cost organisations around $53 billion globally.

Thus, you must identify and remove threats as quickly as possible.

Threat hunting with threat intelligence helps here. You can find threats in an organisation’s networks and systems by thoroughly evaluating each asset.

Threat hunters utilise valuable insights gathered during data collection to find clues for security threats. They look for malware signatures, suspicious activities, anomalies and patterns, etc. Combining their skills with automated systems, threat hunters or security professionals detect threats proactively and resolve them quickly before they can harm your organisation.

Prioritise Risks


Some vulnerabilities and threats need immediate action or they can quickly turn into a full-blown cyberattack.

Hence, finding and addressing them is important. But, an organisation can receive many threat alarms and all could seem critical. In 2023, over 26,000 security vulnerabilities surfaced and 25% of them were targeted immediately to be exploited. In addition, distributing suitable resources to remediate each threat can be challenging.

To manage this, prioritise threats based on their severity. Detect false alarms and save time addressing those threats. Use threat intelligence to detect harmful threats, find vulnerabilities that need immediate attention, prioritise threats, and how to effectively allocate resources for remediation.

Choose Efficient Threat Intelligence Tools

Speed up your threat intelligence workflow by utilising the right tools and technologies. These will quickly collect, organise, and analyse data to power your threat intelligence efforts. The threat intelligence tool or service you choose must have the following attributes:

  • A user-friendly interface so that everyone in your security team can use it without difficulties
  • Integrates well with your existing security systems and workflows
  • Uses a standardised format to structure data for analysis
  • Provides a high data quality
  • Must be comprehensive - capable of gathering vulnerability data from various databases, detecting malicious code in software, finding issues in maintenance, etc.
  • Must provide indicators of compromise (IoC) and granular access controls

Compliant with applicable regulatory bodies

Choose a tool based on your organisation’s size, number of assets, and the industry you serve under.

Monitor Continuously

Threats keep on evolving and advancing, and to combat them, you need to change your threat intelligence strategies and enterprise risk management frameworks.

So, monitor your systems and networks continuously for security incidents to keep up with threats and vulnerabilities. In addition, review your strategies periodically and improve them.

If your business enters a new industry, align your threat intelligence process according to the requirements of this industry. It will help you stay protected from threats and compliant with regulatory bodies.

Update and Patch Regularly

Never delay in implementing software updates and patches.

According to a Dark Reading report, unpatched vulnerabilities were the cause behind 60% of data breaches.

So, as soon as an update or patch is available for a system or software, apply them. It will keep the system in its best security posture since the vendor must have found and fixed the vulnerabilities in it. So, even if an attacker manages to find a vulnerability in an application, they can’t exploit it as you’ve updated the application.

Employee Training and Awareness

Keep your employees aware of recent threat intelligence techniques and cybersecurity incidents, risks, and trends. Train them on using advanced tools so they can use them effectively and respond to attacks fearlessly.

In addition, conduct periodic training, webinars, and sessions to train your employees on using internet-safe practices, the importance of maintaining password hygiene, and tools and techniques. This way, they can protect themselves and organisational data from attacks.

Talk to our experts today



Implement Threat Intelligence with Microminder CS

If you want to get an edge over threat actors and protect your enterprise from attacks, use threat intelligence solutions and services by Microminder CS. What you’ll get:

  • Access to open-source and commercial threat intelligence feeds with extensive insights on threats, vulnerabilities, and threat actors’ tactics
    Proactive threat detection and mitigation
  • Capability to tackle advanced persistent threats (APTs) with real-time intelligence and sophisticated techniques
    Enhanced response times and security posture
  • Reduced costs related to incident response and downtime
  • Compliance with regulations
  • Seamless integration with your security tools


Talk to our experts and avail of MCS’s Threat Intelligence Solutions today! 

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FAQs

What is strategic threat intelligence in cybersecurity?

Strategic threat intelligence in cybersecurity means insights that you can use to safeguard your enterprise from cyberattacks. It involves collecting, processing, and analysing quality data from reliable sources.

What are the three pillars of effective threat detection?

The three pillars of effective threat detection include: Confidentiality (of systems and data for safety against attackers) Availability (of systems and data for daily use) Integrity (of data and systems, ensuring it remains untampered by threat actors)

What are the 3 main ways to prevent security threats?

To prevent security threats: Update and patch your systems Use strong passwords and authentication methods like two-factor authentication Utilise security advanced tools and solutions like threat intelligence solutions, antivirus tools, incident detection and prevention solutions, and more.

Strategic threat intelligence in cybersecurity means insights that you can use to safeguard your enterprise from cyberattacks. It involves collecting, processing, and analysing quality data from reliable sources.

The three pillars of effective threat detection include: Confidentiality (of systems and data for safety against attackers) Availability (of systems and data for daily use) Integrity (of data and systems, ensuring it remains untampered by threat actors)

To prevent security threats: Update and patch your systems Use strong passwords and authentication methods like two-factor authentication Utilise security advanced tools and solutions like threat intelligence solutions, antivirus tools, incident detection and prevention solutions, and more.

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