Provided by Prostream SA & Ctrl Digital ZA.

There is an ever-growing threat landscape, and security professionals require additional skills, tools, and advanced strategies to combat those who wish to cause harm. Threat intelligence helps organizations fight back against any looming cyber threats. Aggregating, processing, and analyzing data is done to better understand an attacker’s motives, targets, and attack behavior. Once processed and filtered, the data is turned into threat intelligence feeds and management reports that contain information that can be fed into automated security solutions. These types of cyber-security are intended to inform organizations of the risks and how to prevent them.

The Scenario

Despite bad actors becoming more sophisticated and organized, they are not the only attackers to watch for in 2022. Even now, hackers still opportunistically exploit commoditized exploits. These tactics can be carried out by leveraging resources such as phishing kits or ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) that are highly profitable and accessible. In addition, the resources aid even the smallest bad actors to leverage advanced, malicious code, allowing them to create campaigns and execute with ease. 

Organizations are increasingly required to manage security vulnerabilities in an ever-changing threat landscape. Threat intelligence feeds can provide valuable assistance in this process by identifying common indicators of compromise (IOC) and recommending proactive measures to prevent an attack. Common indicators of compromise include:

• A malicious application could communicate with a known threat actor through an IP address, URL, or domain name.
• A phishing attempt would use unsuspecting users to click on a link or attachment and launch a malicious command by way of email addresses, email subjects, links, and attachments.
• Registration keys, filenames, file hashes, and DLLs may be compromised by a computer whose behavior has already been flagged as nefarious or infected.

The Solution

Incident Response 

Cyber-attacks and data breaches are becoming more frequent, and an employee responsible for Incident response may be under immense pressure. During a security incident, information security personnel may be faced with overwhelming manual work to identify the problem. This is where threat intelligence can prove helpful. Through threat intelligence, organizations can eliminate the chance of false positives, prioritize alerts according to the risk and compare data between internal and external sources. 

Security Operations

As a result of a large number of network alerts, organizations with security operation centers may suffer from ‘alert fatigue,’ which can lead analysts to take alerts for granted. Using Threat Intelligence, SOC teams can better handle alerts, gather information on possible threats ahead of time, reduce false positives, and provide more accessible incident analysis. 

Management of Vulnerabilities

Most organizations consider patching every vulnerability they identify when it comes to vulnerability management. While time-consuming and counterproductive, it is not a realistic goal; a better strategy would be to deal with vulnerabilities based on risk. By combining internal vulnerability scans and the data generated with external data, Threat Intelligence helps in this domain while providing context through intelligence on attacker techniques, tactics, and procedures. 

Effective Risk Analysis 

Risk models are mathematical representations of systems that incorporate probability distributions. The purpose of risk modeling is to help organizations decide where to invest. However, risk models suffer from nonspecific, nonquantified results that are hastily compiled, based on little information, or unfounded assumptions.

By providing valuable context, Threat Intelligence can assist organizations in defining risk measurements in a more precise manner, which will allow for more accurate risk analysis. Threat intelligence can provide valuable information on which threat is perpetrating an attack, what type of industry they are targeting, similar attacks that have occurred, vulnerabilities the attackers intend to exploit, and what damage is likely to result if the attack is successful. Threat Intelligence can answer these questions, increasing the context and accuracy of risk models developed by organizations during risk analysis. 

Fraud Prevention

It is one thing for an organization to detect and respond to threats that have already exploited its networks and systems. However, it is also vital for organizations to be on the lookout for fraudulent use of their data or brand. Information gathered from Threat Intelligence can help with this by providing knowledge about the methods and motivations of criminals, significantly when it is correlated with thread data. 

Organizations can fall victim to cyber criminals who impersonate their brand to attack unsuspecting customers with phishing attacks. Threat intelligence can alert an organization to the latest phishing trends, enabling it to detect potential threats preemptively. 

The Conclusion

As the threat landscape continues to expand, cyber threats can seriously harm your organization. Through a comprehensive cyber threat intelligence platform, you can mitigate the risks that harm your reputation and finances. Find out how Prostream’s Threat Intelligence Solutions can help your organization stay ahead of cyber threats by requesting a demo today.