Amplify All Sources of Threat Intelligence to Action

When it comes to threat intelligence, it's important to cast a wide net and consume all available information. Any source of threat intelligence, that can be ingested, can provide valuable insights. However, ingestion without intelligent processing, including de-duplication, normalization, correlation, and enrichment can be very quickly overwhelming. The goal is to identify potential threats and expedite action. Analyzing more data generally yields more accurate insight.

By taking a comprehensive approach to cyber threat intelligence, organizations can raise the bar on their security posture and better protect against cyberattacks. This means ensuring that all potential sources of threat intelligence are leveraged. This includes structured, unstructured, external, and internal sources of threat intel. Organizations often neglect or miss the wealth of threat intelligence available within their own networks.

Let's take a closer look at each of these aspects and why they are important.

**Internal or External — Every Source Matters **

As organizations continue to grapple with the ever-evolving threat landscape, it's essential to acknowledge that both internal and external threat intelligence sources play a critical role in identifying relevant threats.

Internally deployed tools like SIEMs, Firewall, UEBA, IDS/IPS, Antivirus, etc. generate valuable intelligence, such as network logs, incident reports, historical incident data, suspicious emails, and other internal telemetry, provide organizations with a deep understanding of their unique environment. This contextual understanding can be invaluable when it comes to taking proactive measures to protect against potential attacks. By tapping into their internal network, systems, and applications, security teams can gain insights into potential vulnerabilities and prioritize potential threats based on their specific context.

On the other hand, external sources of threat intelligence, such as commercial providers, regulatory bodies, CERTs, ISACs/ISAOs, dark web, email scraping, email subscriptions, web scraping, blogs, etc., provide organizations with a broader context about threats that may be targeting multiple organizations. This information can be used to inform an organization’s threat intelligence program and help identify potential threats.

While external sources certainly provide valuable insights, the contextual understanding that internal sources offer is equally important. Relying solely on just one type of source — internal or external — may limit an organization’s visibility into the broader threat landscape, ergo it is important to analyze both internal and external threat intelligence sources in tandem. By leveraging both sources, organizations can identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate the presence of a threat actor or malicious activity. This approach allows security teams to gain a comprehensive understanding of the threat landscape and effectively manage and mitigate the risks associated with threats.

Unstructured Formats Contain Wealth of Intel

Threat intelligence can come in a variety of formats, including structured and unstructured data. Structured data is often easier to ingest and analyze because it is organized in a specific format, such as STIX 1.x/2.0, TAXII, MISP, MAEC, XML, CSV, YARA, OpenIOC, JSON, PDF, CybOX, etc. On the other hand, unstructured data lacks consistent organization but is no less important. It is mostly found in text documents or social media posts. Converting unstructured data into a structured format ensures that it too may yield insights.

This requires that unstructured data must be normalized, enriched, correlated, and de-duplicated, making it useful for enriching threat data to identify, prioritize, and respond to threats.

Correlation is Must

After ingesting threat intelligence from different sources and in different formats, organizations must focus on correlating that intelligence. Context is the factor that differentiates information from intelligence and helps security teams understand whether the intelligence is actionable or not.

Correlation allows organizations to identify patterns and trends across multiple data sources, which can be used to detect and respond to potential threats. By correlating threat intelligence from various sources, such as internal logs and external feeds, organizations can identify indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors to carry out attacks. As part of the correlation process, the IOCs should be further validated through confidence scoring. This will help eliminate noise and reduce the number of false positives, enabling security teams to focus only on relevant indicators, which can lead them to a more efficient and effective threat detection and response process. Additionally, by detecting patterns and trends, organizations can identify previously unknown threats that may have gone undetected.

Moreover, cyber threat intelligence correlation can help organizations prioritize threats based on their potential impact and the likelihood of an attack occurring. By understanding the context of a threat and its potential impact on the organization, security teams can prioritize their response and take appropriate actions to mitigate the threat. In simpler terms, correlation results in contextualized and actionable threat intelligence that accelerates threat detection, investigation, and response activities.

Simplify Threat Intel Ingestion with Cyware

Cyware offers a comprehensive threat intelligence platform, Intel Exchange (CTIX), that helps security teams to automate threat intel ingestion from internal and external sources, as well as unstructured and structured formats. Automated ingestion reduces the need for manual effort and eliminates human error, enabling organizations to collect and analyze threat intelligence quickly and efficiently.

Intel Exchange manages threat intelligence from multiple sources, including internal logs, external threat intelligence feeds, trusted networks (ISACs/ISAOs), and other structured and unstructured sources. This makes it easy for security teams to view and analyze all the threat intelligence in one place. The intelligence is further enriched, correlated, and analyzed before dissemination and actioning. One of the key features of Intel Exchange is its ability to automate response workflows within the internal security stack. For instance, the platform can automatically block malicious IPs in Firewalls and update SIEM data. Such automated actioning enables security teams to significantly reduce their response time, minimize the risk of human error, and improve the overall effectiveness of their security operations.

Schedule a demo to learn how you can simplify the threat intelligence ingestion process.