Threat intelligence is like a radar on steroids.
Unlike a traditional radar, which only offers one reading at a time, threat intelligence has more layers and meaning. It gives you multiple levels of data and analysis simultaneously. It helps security teams detect threats before they attack, with more meaningful information about security challenges.
A good threat intelligence software can help you identify new vulnerabilities before a hacker exploits them by warning you when an attacker's tactics change so that you can adapt your defenses.
What is threat intelligence?
Threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge that enables you to contextualize a cyber attack. It gives you the info you need to understand attackers’ methods, motivations, and capabilities. Taking it a step further, it provides actionable insights into indicators of compromise (IoC) in your systems.
Context is the pillar of threat intelligence. Without it, threat intelligence transforms into an unmanageable stream of alerts. It would look like the unorganized contents of your Notes app spread across multiple systems.
When security analysts have context, they’re better equipped to understand the threat and threat actors they’re dealing with to create a response plan suitable for each situation.
If context is the pillar of threat intelligence, relevance, timeliness, and actionability become its supporting shafts. These three elements of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) ensure that relevant threat data gets collected and analyzed quickly, providing actionable advice for decision-making.
Threat hunting vs. threat intelligence
Threat hunting is the process of finding threats across systems by using gathered and processed threat intelligence. It’s conducted to prove or disprove a hypothesis of threats identified in an organization’s network.
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Security teams assume at least one system has been compromised while performing the threat hunting process. They search for threat evidence using tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR) software and security information and event management (SIEM) tools. Threat hunting is aimed at reducing the time of system compromise and incident response.
On the other hand, threat intelligence details information about the present and emerging threats. Organizations get this data through threat intelligence feeds and make a detailed report. Once the company uses this info to identify trends, the security team can set up relevant defenses to prevent a threat from damaging the organization’s assets.
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Why is threat intelligence important?
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is a must-have criterion for organizations if they want to make the right decisions at the right time before, during, and after a hostile cyber situation. Cybercriminals have improved their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), making threat intelligence indispensable for security teams gathering threat intelligence data and successfully remediating vulnerabilities before they’re compromised.
Below are some common benefits of threat intelligence:
- Helps companies save on fines, lawsuits, and other charges associated with data breaches
- Allows teams to act on priority security threats
- Minimizes the risk of data loss
- Facilitates collaborative learning in organizations and helps them improve their cybersecurity practices
Threat intelligence paints a clear picture of an organization’s threat landscape. It simplifies and eases an organization’s efforts in developing, maintaining, and refining intelligence requirements, all of which support business operation in the planning and operation stage of the threat intelligence lifecycle.
Some organizations equip their team with threat data feeds in their network, but ultimately, that overburdens workers with data that lacks any actionable intelligence to work on. With threat intelligence tools, security analysts can better prioritize actions on threats.
Below are some common threat intelligence use cases:
- Incident enrichment with threat data. Security teams use threat intelligence to eliminate false positives and proactively respond to incidents with actionable information.
- Modeling external threat landscape. Analysts use threat intel to understand attack details and how their organization can defend against them.
- Incident prioritization. Teams prioritize incident response based on the severity of threats.
- Hunt missions. Security teams look for any undiscovered attack related to present threats targeting an organization, geolocations, or applications.
Types of threat intelligence
Cyber threat intelligence can be broadly classified into three types: strategic, tactical, and operational. They cater to unique purposes and provide a comprehensive overview of the threat landscape when put together.
Strategic CTI
Strategic cyber threat intelligence provides a high-level overview of an organization’s security posture, risks, cyber attack trends, and financial impacts. The primary audience for strategic CTI is the C-suite or senior management. A strategic CTI report strays away from heavy technicalities and usually discusses the business impact of a cyber threat and future risks.
If you have a reasonable understanding of present and future threats, you are better equipped to strengthen your security posture and mitigate the risks. Key decision-makers utilize strategic CTI reporting to evaluate their decisions and investigate their impact. Strategic intelligence can come from both internal and external sources. For example, you can mine strategic intelligence data from experts, whitepapers, and local and national media.
Tactical CTI
Tactical threat intelligence (TTI) focuses on identifying and mitigating the potential threats an organization faces. Compared to other types of CTI, TTI is a short-term process. It helps businesses recognize malicious tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) and requires a deep understanding of attackers, their skillset, and their working environment.
Tactical CTI caters to the needs of security staff and administrators and establishes technical context. Reports of security vendors are a great place to scout for tactical CTI. You can take a deep dive into them to look for attack techniques, tools, and infrastructure.
This intelligence information is mostly short-lived because any indicator of compromise might become obsolete in just a few hours.
This type of threat intelligence is mostly automated since the team can generate it quickly.
Operational CTI
Operational threat intelligence (OTI) is most useful when the threat is active. Real-time information helps security teams defend against an ongoing cyber attack. It allows teams to identify the capabilities and motivations of an attacker and get an idea of their next steps.
Your operational threat intelligence feed comprises indicators of compromise, hashes, URLs, domain names, and IPs. You can efficiently consume this information through tools like firewall, security information and event management systems (SEIM), and intrusion detection and prevention systems.
This threat intelligence type delivers technical information such as which vulnerabilities are being exploited or what command and control domains are employed. It makes it easier for analysts to pinpoint and respond to a cyber threat on time.
What makes it hard to gather reliable active threat intelligence?
- Access: Threat actors communicating over private or protected networks make it challenging for security professionals to capture this kind of information.
- Obfuscation: Threat actors can use codenames or other occluding tactics to avoid detection.
- Noise: It’s tricky to manually capture threat intelligence from social media, chat rooms, and dark web forums.
- Language barrier: Interpreting communications in a foreign language requires hiring interpreters, which increases the cost of gathering actionable intelligence.
Sources of threat intelligence
Threat intelligence can come from internal detection systems, trusted peers, paid subscription services, government agencies, crowdsourced or open-source communities, and blogs. These sources can be broadly categorized into three categories, as described below.
- Internal: Threat data collected from the organization’s internal network and SEIM. For example, event logs, alerts, firewall logs, incident response reports, or domain name system (DNS) logs.
- External: Threat intelligence data accumulated from freelance security researchers, block lists, and vendor blogs. This open-source intelligence provides context at no cost. However, determining the quality and relevancy of s this kind of data is tricky. An external source also includes data from paid services that provide structured data reports and intelligence feeds. These paid subscriptions have service-level agreements on data quality.
- Community: Threat information is collected from trusted channels with members with the same interests – for example, Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs).
Threat intelligence lifecycle
The threat intelligence lifecycle comprises six iterative and adaptable phases that make raw data conclusive. This builds a threat intelligence framework for cybersecurity programs and guides them to uphold high data hygiene standards and draw actionable insights from data.
Let’s take a quick look at the six phases of the threat intelligence lifecycle.
- Planning and direction: Sets goals and scope of the threat intelligence program. It involves understanding business assets and processes that requires protection.
- Collection: Gathers information about processing techniques and data sources required to fuel a threat intelligence program.
- Processing: Transforms collected information into a format suitable for analysis.
- Analysis: Converts information into intelligence and supports decision-making.
- Dissemination: Reports threat intelligence to different teams that can use it for their benefit.
- Feedback: Collects suggestions on the threat intelligence report to identify necessary improvements.
Planning and direction
The planning and direction phase lays the foundation for threat intelligence analysis. It involves setting the purpose and scope and then identifying significant goals and tasks necessary for achieving a threat intelligence program’s vision. Analysts often refer to these elements as intelligence requirements (IRs), and professionals in public sector organizations call them essential elements of intelligence (EEIs).
Security analysts can also identify potential attackers, their motivations, possible attack surfaces, and security measures to defend against potential cyber attacks. This phase provides a broader overview and reasons for executing a threat intelligence program without going too deep into technicalities.
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of an organization usually guides this stage and helps the security team establish the groundwork for conducting threat intelligence activities. It involves identifying all information needed to accomplish set goals, defining key performance indicators (KPIs), and addressing possible challenges analysts might encounter during the analysis.
Questions that need answers during the planning and direction phase:
- What types of cyber attacks is your organization most vulnerable to?
- Who leverages the threat intelligence gathered through this analysis?
- How would this cyber intelligence program support key business objectives?
- Who are the attackers, and why are they initiating these cyber attacks?
- What are other systems and applications that would benefit from this?
- How does threat intelligence improve operational efficiency?
The planning and direction phases also include studying the impact of interruptions and asset loss for the organization.
Collection
The purpose of the collection phase is to gather a good quantity of high-quality data. Good data quality helps you avoid false positives and focus on critical threat events. The collection phase identifies data types and sources of threat intelligence that can supply quality information for analysis.
Analysts collect data from traffic sources, social media, trusted peers, industry experts, and common vulnerabilities and exploits (CVEs) according to the goals defined in the first phase. The data can come from internal, external, or community sources, provided that it’s reliable.
Questions that need answers in the collection phases:
- Can you rely on the source you’ve identified?
- What type of specialized and automated techniques can you use to collect data?
- What are the grey areas where you don’t have enough data to achieve threat intelligence goals?
Processing
The processing phase involves formatting collected data to make it suitable for analysis. Analysts organize the data on spreadsheets, decrypt files, extract metadata from malware samples, translate data from foreign sources, and check for data quality. They also remove redundancies and false positives.
Analysts have to work with huge volumes of data in the processing stage. Manual processing seems unrealistic with the number of IoCs organizations handle. CISOs prefer automation to expedite the process and make it doable for their team.
Questions that need answers in the processing phase:
- Is processed data free of redundancies, duplications, and false positives?
- What software can you use to automate data processing?
- Is the processed data suitable for analysis?
Analysis
During the analysis phase, analysts work on deciphering the dataset and producing action items, recommendations, and suggestions for the critical stakeholders of the threat intelligence program. It thoroughly examines the dataset to answer questions in the planning phase.
The analysis phase of the threat intelligence lifecycle aims at converting processed data into context through advanced correlation and data modeling. Although this is a largely human-oriented phase, some mundane or low-risk decisions might get automated as artificial intelligence and machine learning paces up.
Questions that need answers in the analysis phase:
- What assets, processes, and people are at risk?
- What are the potential security issues, and who should know about them?
- What actions can you take to mitigate potential risks?
- What are the other systems and applications that can benefit from the analysis?
- How do action items and recommendations help increase the team’s operational efficiency?
Dissemination
The dissemination phases work on reporting findings of the analysis phase to stakeholders, helping them make the right decisions at the right time. You should record these findings and keep track of them. It helps you retain information from the first iteration of the threat intelligence lifecycle and prevents you from losing it while conducting subsequent iterations.
In an enterprise, multiple teams rely on threat intelligence and have unique needs and skillsets. While reporting, ensure that the action items and recommendations of threat intelligence analysis are understandable and actionable for each team. You can report the analysis using easy-to-digest graphs, charts, and tables so the various departments can derive logical conclusions.
In your report, make recommendations with decision trees and processes required to initiate an incident response, threat remediation, and vulnerability management.
Questions that need answers in the dissemination phase:
- What is the best way to present your findings?
- What tools can you use to effectively report your findings?
- How confident are you with the analysis’ reliability, relevancy, and accuracy?
- Are action items understandable and are the next steps clear?
- Do key decision-makers have all the data they need?
Feedback
The feedback phase lets you understand how you can improve in your next iteration of threat intelligence stages. Make sure stakeholders tell you how often they need to receive threat intelligence reports and how they want the data presented. Document the feedback you receive from stakeholders and learn from it.
The feedback phase is closely related to the planning and direction phase, as it helps key stakeholders guide their threat intelligence lifecycle. It ensures that intelligence needs are being met and allows stakeholders to make modifications based on changing priorities.
The ultimate goal of the feedback phase is to continuously refine the threat intelligence program and get accurate information to people who need it.
Questions that need answers in the feedback phase:
- What should the cadence for threat intelligence reporting be?
- Did stakeholders benefit from the finished intelligence report? If not, why?
- How can you improve the threat intelligence lifecycle and its outcome?
Threat intelligence challenges
Structuring an organization’s cybersecurity strategies, defenses, and countermeasures doesn’t come without challenges. Below are some of the obstacles that customers and producers of threat intelligence encounter.
Overload of threat intelligence data
There are numerous threat intelligence feeds that supply raw data. The sheer volume of data poses a challenge for security analysts who have to identify, prioritize, and work on specific datasets to produce actionable intelligence promptly.
Organizations have addressed this issue by identifying reliable resources, optimizing their techniques, and leveraging threat intelligence platforms.
Tip: Start managing voluminous threat data with free threat intelligence software.
Threat data quality and interoperability
Quality of threat intelligence data prevails as one of the major CTI issues. Security feed providers need to improve their sensors and techniques to capture relevant data to make threat intelligence more valuable.
On the other hand, the lack of standardization in which raw threat intelligence data is shared between peers contributes to friction in interoperability. To address this, the MITRE group rolled out a few standards: Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) and Trusted Automated Exchange of Indicator Information (TAXII).
However, if standardization cannot be established while sharing data due to constraints, peers can use data transformation.
Legal and privacy issues
There can be privacy and legal issues about how data is being shared and the laws that govern it. Some companies refrain from sharing threat data for multiple reasons like reputation damage.
At times, this might lead to a scarcity of threat data about an operational cyber attack that continues damaging businesses.
Adversarial ML
Cybercriminals can detect flaws in machine learning (ML) augmented cyber threat intelligence and feed malicious inputs to increase its misclassification rate. This results in data leaks. Attackers can take undue advantage of ML models that are usually trained to process data from similar original distributions, potentially causing these models to malfunction.
Below are a few best practices for leveraging threat intelligence:
- Monitor threats continuously and be proactive about setting preventative measures against potential threats.
- Integrate threat intelligence solutions with the existing security tech stack to avoid manual work and save time.
- Prepare an incident response plan to determine the people and operational processes involved in mitigating a threat.
- Automate threat intelligence implementation to save time and focus more on responding to priority security threats.
- Show the business value of a threat intelligence program while reporting to the board to gain buy-ins from key stakeholders.
Threat intelligence software
Threat intelligence software provides information about new forms of cyber attacks like zero-day attacks, malware, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting. The software tailors information specific to the organization’s network, endpoint devices, and infrastructure. Security teams use actionable intelligence generated from the software to defend against emerging threats and create plans to remediate vulnerabilities.
To qualify for inclusion in the threat Intelligence software list, a product must:
- Inform the user of emerging vulnerabilities and threats
- Provide details on remediation practices of common threats
- Examine global threats on different networks and devices
- Offer threat information to specific IT solutions
* Below are the five leading threat intelligence software from Summer 2022 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
1. CrowdStrike Falcon: Endpoint Protection
CrowdStrike Falcon: Endpoint Protection helps security teams protect systems against cyber attacks using a lightweight sensor. There’s no need to install any on-premise equipment or scan systems frequently with the software. The platform is flexible and extensible when meeting your security needs.
What users like:
“CrowdStrike's central management platform is fantastic. As a thinly-staffed department in our organization, we need to do much more with less, and we absolutely cannot sacrifice when it comes to security. We can easily manage all of our endpoints any time, anywhere.”
- CrowdStrike Falcon: Endpoint Protection Review, Ryan M.
What users dislike:
“User interface could be better. It should provide more access to reports.”
- CrowdStrike Falcon: Endpoint Protection Review, Abhimanyu S.
2. FortiGate NGFW
The FortiGate next-gen firewall is a network security appliance that adds intrusion prevention, secure sockets layer (SSL) inspection, application and user visibility, and unknown threat detection to the traditional firewall. Organizations rely on FortiGate to defend against web-based network threats.
What users like:
“We have been using the FortiGate firewall as a perimeter for over five years. We are completely reliant on a next-generation firewall because we have many externally accessible web apps.
The administration console is simple, and the learning process is similarly straightforward. It's effortless to do the initial configurations. In addition, a next-generation firewall helps connect our various branch offices. We've also set up an SSL VPN for branch connectivity.”
- FortiGate NGFW Review, Samurthika A.
What users dislike:
“Sometimes it can become challenging to block content from a website with web filtering because web pages contain websites that consume other resources. Administration on a mobile device is very complicated. It does not adapt to the screen of smartphones or tablets, and the option of FortiExplore has an additional cost in online stores.”
- FortiGate NGFW Review, Luis O.
3. Dataminr
Dataminr’s AI platform provides the earliest signals of emerging risks and high-impact events from publicly available data. It improves event detection accuracy by using deep learning-based multi-modal AI fusion methods.
What users like:
“I really like the map features and the possibility to see alerts in real-time when they pop up on the map, as well as the possibility to receive alerts via email/pop-up for those times when you can't keep looking at the screen on Dataminr.
I also really like the support that our point of contact provides – he responds really quickly and is always helpful.”
- Dataminr Review, User in Security and Investigations
What users dislike:
“Occasionally, we have information overload, but the Dataminr team provides unrivaled support to individual team members to address any issues.”
- Dataminr Review, User in Insurance
4. Intezer Analyze
Intezer Analyze speeds up incident response by automating alert triage, incident response, and threat hunting. It easily integrates into the security operations center and incident response teams' workflows and eliminates false positives by reducing alert response time.
What users like:
“Intezer is one of the best online threat and virus analysis tools, and it has unique features and integrations compared to the other security tools. I like Intezer's online analysis tool via uploading files most where you can upload your suspicious file to analyze the threats. Intezer also has other analysis tools like URL, memory dump, endpoint, and secure your cloud deployment using Intezer Protect.
Intezer gives you access to various platforms interaction with plugins for Chrome and more.”
- Intezer Analyze Review, Ajay R.
What users dislike:
“The pricing model is confusing and arbitrary. Sometimes scans are a little bit ambiguous in terms of "is this file malicious or not". I understand that's the name of the game, but a community voting system like Virus Total would go a long way to making the results a little more human-friendly.”
- Intezer Analyze Review, Derek W.
5. Silo by Authentic8
Silo by Authentic8 executes all web code on secure cloud servers while ensuring online investigations stay secure and web-borne threats never touch trusted assets. It maintains fully encrypted audit logs and complete policy control over user activity regardless of the computer, network, or cloud app.
What users like:
“I implemented this in different ways to support different use cases, and each time it was simple and quick to get up and run. Also, finding information like who is talking to which domains, or which domains you see being malware, or C2 is just a straightforward search without requiring a lot of data searching.
No need to configure any additional settings on the endpoint side! We need to enter the IP of the umbrella DNS server. It provides outstanding blocking policies to prevent the user from visiting unwanted sites.”
- Silo by Authentic8 Review, Hegar M.
What users dislike:
“There are some technical and service aspects that could be improved. For example, user service usually takes a long time without need. Email response times can take several days for problems that can be easily fixed.”
- Silo by Authentic8 Review, Akio Y.
Stare back at every malicious gaze
It's not news to anyone that the digital landscape is growing more and more dangerous, with threats and vulnerabilities popping up on all sides. Threat intelligence helps you identify those threats in the first place and mitigate risks before they can impact your business.
Threat intelligence allows you to recognize potential attack surfaces, remediate vulnerabilities in your systems before attackers exploit them, and stand tall against cybercriminals.
Discover how you can effectively remediate vulnerabilities in your networks and systems with a robust vulnerability management process.
