Protecting your digital assets and ensuring your information is secure requires an ongoing strategy to strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity defenses. Today, advanced tech security offers actionable threat intelligence for real-time responses that help keep up with sophisticated cybercrimes. Here, we explore how actionable threat intelligence empowers organizations to proactively detect, assess, and counter evolving cyber threats.
What is Actionable Threat Intelligence?
Actionable threat intelligence consists of highly responsive contextual data regarding cyber threats and threat actors, allowing security teams to mitigate security risks in real-time. Using threat intelligence enables you to leverage actionable insights to prevent potential threats from escalating into full-scale attacks. The proactive nature of this approach is critical to cyber security in today's volatile and high-risk digital landscape. It allows you to detect threats early and automatically respond to significantly reduce potential damages, including:
- Indicators of Compromise (IoC)
- Potential attackers
- Attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP)
However, this data needs to be contextualized for your security team to make decisions that prevent and even stop cyber-attacks in their tracks. This requires machine learning to convert the data into relevant information that can quickly process the potential impact on your organization and devise ways to moderate it.
What are the Types of Threat Intelligence?
There are three types of threat intelligence:
1. Tactical Threat Intelligence
Tactical intelligence focuses on the immediate future, identifying IoCs such as bad IP addresses, malicious domain names, URLs, file hashes, etc. Because it can be machine-readable, it can be read and analyzed by security products, making it easy to collect data automatically.
2. Operational Threat Intelligence
Operational threat intelligence allows you to study cybercriminal moves, including their motivation and intent and how they plan to attack. This data is more complicated as, right now, machines are not equipped to create operational threat intelligence. As a result, we still need human analysis for operational threat intelligence. It is most useful in security operations centers to tackle things like vulnerability management and threat monitoring. However, emerging software like T-Intelligence has advanced operational threat intelligence. As a result, it provides a broader perspective of the types of threats out there to help you defend against the underlying problems.
3. Strategic Threat Intelligence
The last type of threat intelligence is strategic to inform business decisions while helping to create processes. It effectively understands the constantly evolving cybercrime techniques, showing decision-makers the risks their organizations pose should there be a cyber-attack. This is the most complex intelligence to generate and relies mainly on human data collection and analysis.
What are the Benefits of Cyber Threat Intelligence?
With actionable threat intelligence, security teams can map their threat landscape and leverage that vital contextual real-time data to develop a more robust, information-driven cyber defense strategy. As a result, you can become quicker at cyber threat response, resolving security incidents before they have a chance to become full-blown. By converting raw data into relevant, contextualized data using AI to detect potentially malicious events, your team can prioritize threats for action.
Combining automation with human analysis creates a scalable security strategy that strengthens your cybersecurity infrastructure. All the threat data sitting in disparate sources come together to create a broader picture of your threat landscape so you can effectively neutralize them before they become catastrophic events. However, it takes effective actionable threat intelligence software to manage the data and quickly respond without the need for human interventions.
What are the Uses of Actionable Threat Intelligence?
There are several ways your organization can leverage actionable threat intelligence, including:
Early Detection of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs): Improve your cyber-attack response by proactively detecting APTs that can go undetected for months or longer. You can detect suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access attempts, to reduce the damage of these types of attacks.
Improve Vulnerability Management: Actionable threat intelligence discovers and prioritizes vulnerabilities in real-time so you patch the highest threats first and automatically create a stronger infrastructure so your weaknesses can’t be exploited.
Forensic Investigations: Collecting real-time information on the tactics used by bad actors allows you to become better at cutting breaches off in their tracks. Post-incident analysis becomes easy, so you always understand how serious your threats are.
Profiling: You can also use actionable threat intelligence to perform adversary profiling so you understand your most threatening actors and what motivates them. As a result, you better understand their tactics and the type of anomalous behavior that poses the most significant threats. Your team will also remain one step ahead of emerging threats.
How to Overcome Strategic Threat Intelligence Challenges
While this sounds impressive, finding a solution that seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack and security infrastructure is essential. When it comes to cybersecurity, threat intelligence software provides a solution engineered to keep threats from ever entering your network to begin with.
This is the power of T-Intelligence, which ensures your data remains secure with minimal disruption to your setup. It is designed to identify malicious threats and then reverse engineer them to strengthen your security measures with each passing day. It also overcomes common challenges in deploying other security software in the following ways:
Escalating threats: Once your software is deployed, you must stay ahead of escalating cyber threats. In some cases, the software requires human intervention that allows breaches to escalate. However, T-Intelligence uses penetration testing technologies to provide a clear window into potential vulnerabilities so organizations can proactively prevent malicious attacks.
Deployment: T-Intelligence is designed for quick deployment so you can implement innovative, take-charge cyber security solutions and start defending against risk immediately.
Adaptability: Because new threats arise daily, you can soon find that less effective software is not keeping up with emerging trends. However, with each new threat identified, T-Intelligence uses machine learning to adapt to new threats so it becomes more effective with each threat.
False alarms: Some software still sends alerts for false alarms that require human intervention. T-Intelligence only alerts you to credible threats, so you spend less time monitoring.
As you can see, continuous monitoring and integration of automated tools are essential for an effective real-time threat response strategy. Actionable threat intelligence gives your security team the insights they need to mitigate security risks in real time and intercept potential threats before they can escalate into full-scale attacks.
To learn more about how your security team can use T-Intelligence actionable threat intelligence capabilities, set up a demo with the MEDI team today. Click here for more information.
