Honing the Art of Cyber Intelligence

Key Findings

• There is a lack of a clear understanding of cyber intelligence and its role in organizational security. This leads to misplaced efforts and increased organizational vulnerability in the face of advanced threats.
• Organizations face difficulty in collating and analyzing the relevant data due to formation of information silos and lack of collaboration within the organization. 
• There is a need for combining human intellect and machine capabilities to manage the vast amounts of data generated from various internal and external sources.
• To make the most out of Threat Intel, to detect advanced threat actors, and provide an effective threat response, it is necessary for organizations to adopt security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) technologies. This also helps organizations save time and resources wasted on manual tasks.
• Let us take a look at how Cyware’s next-gen security solutions help organizations tackle the challenges pointed out in the report and adopt the best practices recommended by the researchers.

Acing Threat Intelligence with CTIX

• Difficulty accessing data - A major challenge for many small and big organizations is access to the relevant information based on their organization, industry sector, location, assets, or other parameters. Without access to quality threat information, it is difficult for security analysts to pinpoint the most relevant threats for blocking them or providing remediation measures. Cyware Threat Intelligence eXchange (CTIX) is a unique bi-directional threat intelligence platform (TIP) that enables analysts to setup automated Intel collection from multiple internal and external sources, and filter, enrich, and share the most relevant Threat Intel within their own trusted information sharing network using its advanced Rule Engine. Moreover, with CTIX’s Hub and Spoke model, organizations can leverage the relevant and actionable intelligence gained from various members in its information sharing network.
•  Lack of resources - In many cases, organizations lack people with the right skills or face a shortage of qualified people for various cyber intelligence roles. Moreover, a dependence on manual processes or outdated technologies for Intel collection, enrichment, processing or analysis tends to eat up the valuable time of the limited workforce available to the organization. Due to the automated Intel ingestion, enrichment, processing, and analysis features in CTIX, analysts can save a lot of time and focus on investigating only the most relevant threats.
• Lack of leadership buy-in - A disconnect between cyber intelligence teams and the organization’s leadership can result in wastage of resources or sub-par performance for the organization. Such a disconnect often arises due to the limited visibility that the decision makers have into the cyber intelligence operations and lack of avenues for giving their inputs in it. CTIX addresses this by providing a Multi-level Intel View for employees in various roles to give them visibility into Intel operations and help improve coordination between the senior management and security teams for delivering an effective threat response. Moreover, it also provides a Centralized Threat Dashboard for viewing customized confidence scores, factor-based prioritization of cyber threats, and detailed statistical metrics. With such features, CTIX ensures the inclusion of cyber intelligence in strategic and tactical decision making for the organizations.

Cyber Fusion Center with CFTR

• Know your critical assets - CFTR provides security teams with a bird’s eye view of the complete threat environment facing the organization. This includes all the assets owned and operated by the organization, the vulnerabilities and threats affecting them, and intelligence gained from internal and external sources on the threats.
• Get rid of Data silos - Due to the compartmentalization of various teams in an organization, a lot of valuable and relevant data within these teams remains unused. This results in extra efforts to collect the necessary information and lack of a comprehensive view of all the information available to the organization.
• Prioritize threats - Without a complete picture of the threat environment, most organizations operate in a reactionary way when it comes to cybersecurity. However, with CFTR, organizations can prioritize threats based on threat actor potential, target exposure, and organizational impact, thereby moving towards a proactive approach to security.
• Create Threat Analysis & Response playbook - Using the security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) technologies, CFTR allows security teams to create playbooks to automate manual processes as well as automating threat response based on alerts received from other existing security solutions. This allows for a swift and effective threat response against advanced threats.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration - With the combination of various security functions in the cyber fusion center, CFTR boosts the collaboration across various teams and allows organizations to exploit the operational synergies across their workforce.

The Final Word