Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is revolutionizing the cybersecurity ecosystem by enabling organizations to share threat data and allow for proactive defense against sophisticated intrusion attempts. it is proved based on information, including setting, instruments, pointers, suggestions, and noteworthy guidance, around a current or developing threat or risk to assets.

Threat is defined as the intent and capability of adversaries to target an asset typically either information or a system. It is also any circumstance or event with the potential to adversely impact an asset through unauthorized access, destruction, disclosure, modification of data, and denial of service.

Intelligence is information that is received or collected to answer specific questions on who, what, where, when, how, and why.

“GARTNER”

FUNDAMENTALS OF CYBER THREAT INTELLIGENCE

• Cyber Threat Hunting

Cyber threat hunting is the process of actively and continually searching networks for cyber threats that bypass existing security measures.

• Cyber Threat Levels and Defense Strategy

Cyber threat levels and cyber defense strategy;

• Level-1 Cyber Vandalism; -: Perimeter Defense on Cyber Threat
• Level-2 Cyber Theft: Critical Information Protection of Cyber Threat
• Level-3 Cyber Surveillance: Responsive Awareness of Cyber Threat
• Level-4 Cyber Espionage: Architectural Resilience of Cyber Threat
• Level-5 Cyber Conflict: Pervasive Agility of Cyber Threat

Cyber threat and defense strategy levels were proposed by the MITRE Corp.

• Cyber Threat Management (CTM)

Cyber threat management is a strategy used by cybersecurity professionals to control a threat’s life cycle in order to detect and respond to it quickly and efficiently.  It proves as the best strategy for assessing and dealing with cyber threats.

TYPES OF THREAT INTELLIGENCE

Threat intelligence is major of three types;

• Strategic Threat Intelligence
• Tactical Threat Intelligence
• Operational Threat Intelligence

• Strategic Threat Intelligence

High-level information about cyber security posture, threats, the financial effect of various cyber activities, attack trends, and the influence of high-level business decisions is provided by strategic threat intelligence. High-level executives and organizational management, such as IT management, absorb this information. It aids management in identifying present cyber security threats, future unknown threats, threat teams, and breach attribution. The information gathered gives a risk-based read that focuses on high-level risk concepts and their probability.

Strategic threat intelligence focuses on long-term issues and sends out periodic notifications about dangers to an organization’s critical assets, including its IT infrastructure, personnel, customers, and applications.

• Tactical Threat Intelligence

Tactical threat intelligence is critical for safeguarding the organization’s assets. It contains information about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that threat actors utilize to carry out assaults. Cyber security professionals such as IT service managers, security operations managers, network operations center (NOC) staff, administrators, and architects ingest tactical threat intelligence.

It aids cyber security experts in comprehending how the adversaries are likely to assault the setup; identifying knowledge leaks from the corporation, as well as the attackers’ technological skills and ambitions, as well as the attack pathways.

• Operational Threat Intelligence

Operational threat intelligence gives information on dangers to the organization as a whole. It gives contextual information above security events and incidents to assist defenders to identify prospective threats, gaining a better understanding of offender techniques, identifying previous malicious behaviors, and conducting malicious activity investigations in a more cost-effective manner. It’s used by security managers, network defenders, security forensics, and fraud detection groups.

INTELLIGENCE LIFECYCLE

The intelligence cycle is the process of identifying, collecting, and developing raw data and information into final intelligence for decision-makers. Following the process will ensure that actions are directed and coordinated in order to efficiently meet the needs of the customer.

Phases of Intelligence Cycle:

• Planning and Direction

It’s used to coordinate intelligence efforts in order to best fulfill the needs of the consumer, and it should involve a lot of interaction between the consumer and the provider. This phase should identify the consumer’s precise requirements, often known as intelligence requirements (IRs) or priority intelligence requirements (PIRs). These IRs and PIRs can be used to determine what data and information are required, as well as how it should be collected. This information is frequently recorded in an intelligence collection plan (ICP).

• Collection

It entails acquiring the data and information that is most likely to meet the needs. This will usually entail gathering information from a variety of sources. It’s a difficult task to figure out which sources are likely to give the needed information, be credible, and deliver information that can be ingested quickly. To help distinguish the signals from the noise, good planning and direction are required.

• Processing and Analysis

The third phase of the cycle is when raw data and information are gathered, merged with other sources, and transformed into intelligence. In this phase, both human and machine capabilities must be focused on responding to the engagement’s IRs while adhering to intelligence principles. Analysts will typically use a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques to assess the significance and implications of processed data, integrate it by combining disparate pieces of data to identify patterns, and then interpret the significance of any newly developed knowledge.

In order to provide accurate and unbiased assessments that are predictive and actionable, analysts are likely to employ a variety of methodologies. During this phase, the sources and the material collected reliability are also assessed.

• Dissemination

Is the timely delivery of completed intelligence products to the intended consumers in an appropriate manner. The frequency with which content is disseminated should correspond to the time period on which it is based — for example, operational content should be delivered regularly, but strategic content should be delivered more infrequently. The intelligence loop can be restarted by requesting input and enhancing existing IRs — or inventing new ones.

WHY IS THREAT INTELLIGENCE IMPORTANT?

For increasing an organization’s cybersecurity posture, threat intelligence gives the following significant benefits.

• CTI is genuinely cost-effective, and it helps preserve the company’s financial budget
• Cyber Threat Intelligence detects potential threats to a company and specifies which threats require immediate attention, allowing the cybersecurity team to plan appropriately.
• CTI alerts businesses to any potential vulnerabilities in their cybersecurity systems, allowing them to take immediate action to prevent cybercriminals from accessing those vulnerabilities. The risk of data loss is reduced as a result of this.
• CTI protects your company from data breaches by rigorously checking for any suspicious links, sites, or IP addresses attempting to access your network.
• The Cyber Threat Intelligence system enables an organization to share cybersecurity practices and threat information.
• Threat intelligence is useful not just in preventing cyber threats, but also in recovering damages.

HOW ORGANIZATIONS USE CYBER THREAT INTELLIGENCE?

The nature of the material provided and the maturity of the consumer organization will determine how much threat intelligence can be consumed across numerous business activities. A separate assessment of an organization’s maturity in terms of generating, consuming, and disseminating cyber threat intelligence is likely to be valuable in determining how to improve an organization’s capabilities in this area.

In addition to the use of cyber threat intelligence within an organization, the following is highlighted.

• Security Operations Centre (SOC)

Threat intelligence will normally be processed by the SOC, which will then be used to provide context to internal data sources such as logs of malicious activity.

• IT Security Management

Tactical threat intelligence can assist IT security departments in prioritizing the implementation of relevant policies across a company.

• Vulnerability Management

Even for organizations with specialized vulnerability management programs, prioritizing vulnerabilities for patching will be difficult due to the large volume of vulnerabilities in a typical estate. Threat intelligence on which specific vulnerabilities are being exploited in the field and are expected to be abused can help firms prioritize based on the likelihood and potential effect of exploitation.

• Investigation and Response

Investigation and incident response processes both require intelligence. Understanding threat actors’ tactics, techniques, and procedures allow for proactive threat hunting to detect their presence on a network.

• Resilience Exercises

In resilience testing activities, threat intelligence is crucial. Threat scenarios are created using intelligence on which threat actors are likely to target the client organization’s core functions and key systems, as well as why and how they are likely to do so.

• Development

Threat intelligence can provide insight that can be used to improve operations in some organizations. Software developers, for example, can employ a better understanding of malicious actors’ behavior to incorporate better security procedures into their work

COBWEBS’ THREAT INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM

Security teams use Cobwebs’ AI-Powered threat intelligence platform in order to identify potential threats, using publicly available data. Data-driven open-source intelligence can provide critical insights to organizations by monitoring, detecting, and analyzing malicious activity on all levels of the internet, including the deep and dark web in order to discover new threats and leads to optimize their investigations.

A cyber threat intelligence platform can help organizations tackle such cybersecurity challenges efficiently and effectively, providing operational intelligence as well as situational awareness. The best and most actionable intelligence can only be generated by a machine learning-based platform as these platforms automate data gathering and processing, continually searches for unstructured data from different sources, and are able to connect the dots for you. They continually learn and self-improve at a pace that’s humanly not possible.

With the right threat intelligence platform, cybersecurity is no longer the domain of elite experts. Cyber intelligence becomes accessible to the people in charge of making decisions and adds value across the entire organization.

Cobwebs cyber threat intelligence platform provides actionable, timely, and relevant intelligence to various types of organizations. It crawls the surface, deep and dark web to protect organizations from potential attacks. By automating the process and leveraging AI, it stays up to speed with the latest, newest, darkest web sources for cybercriminal activities. The platform offers advanced monitoring tools and helps you to get ahead of hackers.

Stay Ahead of Threats and Gain Real-time Intelligence and Security.