Are you a small team facing increased cyber risk? Boost your security posture with greater access to threat intelligence. Here's how.

A modern cybersecurity stack consists of many different tools. These tools range from conventional preventive defenses like antivirus and firewalls to response-focused solutions that leverage threat intelligence and security automation. While large organizations have the resources to create a full-fledged SOC with the necessary personnel and tools, mid-market organizations often have limited options or must rely on available open-source solutions. At Cyware, we believe that every organization must develop a proactive cybersecurity strategy regardless of its resource strength. This can be achieved by leveraging threat intelligence automation to guide your security operations.

How threat intelligence enhances your security operations

Threat intelligence activities are divided into four key phases: ingestion, enrichment and analysis, and actioning, and dissemination.

Ingest

Organizations need to ingest threat intelligence collected from various sources, such as commercial threat intel feed providers, sectoral information sharing communities (ISACs/ISAOs), CERTs, and other OSINT sources. This requires the extraction, aggregation, and normalization of threat data, including threat indicators (IOCs), in structured formats like STIX packages and unstructured formats like emails, reports, or blogs.

Enrich and Analyze

Enrichment and analysis involve processing the raw threat intelligence data, such as a set of malicious IP addresses, and its conversion into actionable intelligence by enriching and correlating it with historical data of related threats. Security teams then contextualize the threat intelligence based on its relevance to their organization’s unique threat environment. Typically this is done through a scoring system in a trusted sharing environment that allows security teams to prioritize results.

Dissemination

Lastly, the enriched threat intelligence is operationalized by sharing it with the different teams that can use it to take actions across different security tools.

As is evident from the above points, the threat intel lifecycle involves repetitive and cumbersome tasks like validating threat data’s authenticity, eliminating false positives and outdated indicators, and evaluating the threat data’s relevance, and so on. However, by implementing this with the right automation technology, organizations can dramatically rethink their cybersecurity posture with an intel-driven approach while eliminating manual effort to boost their response operations.

Purpose-built solution for mid-market security teams

While small and mid-size organizations are often limited to homegrown or open-source solutions due to financial and human resources, CTIX Lite is purpose-built to mitigate this challenge by providing unique advantages catering to their needs in a cost-effective manner. It is the first fully automated, robust cloud-native threat intelligence platform (TIP) for mid-market organizations with small to mid-sized security teams.

• CTIX Lite supports the ingestion, normalization, and dissemination of the latest industry-standard STIX 2.x for sharing intel. This allows organizations to build and analyze the relationships between different intel pieces collected over time and create a knowledge base of threats that impact them.

• Using multi-source threat intel ingestion, organizations can reduce their dependence on any single source of threat information, thereby giving a comprehensive view of all the potential threats rapidly.

• Threat information comes not just from different sources but also in different formats. Once again, CTIX Lite shines at automatically analyzing and extracting threat indicators from different file formats and reducing intel analysts’ burden.

• The most significant benefit of threat intelligence comes when the enriched threat intel is shared with the right stakeholders. CTIX Lite allows security teams to enrich threat intelligence from threat intelligence enrichment sources like Comodo, Polyswarm, VirusTotal, Hybrid Analysis, to name a few.

• Finally, no organization should have to fight alone in the battle against cyber threats, which is why automated intel sharing capabilities with different security tools, business partners, ISACs, CERTs, and more play a crucial role. Numerous ISACs/ISAOs have adopted Cyware’s solutions due to its state-of-the-art threat intelligence sharing solution. Mid-market security teams can leverage the CTIX Lite platform to receive and share threat intelligence with their sectoral ISACs/ISAOs.

The bottom line

Staying prepared for the threat actors’ evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) is not just a nicety but a necessity in the current threat landscape. With the power of automated threat intel collection, analysis, enrichment, actioning, and sharing, CTIX Lite gives mid-market security teams the edge needed to detect and counter future threats.

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