Role of Threat Intelligence in Cyber Fusion

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What is Threat Intelligence in Cybersecurity?

Benefits of Cyber Threat Intelligence-driven vCFC

Who can Embrace Threat Intelligence-driven vCFC?

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Role of Threat Intelligence in Cyber Fusion

  • Cyber Fusion
  • Cyber Threat Intelligence

Posted on: February 22, 2021

Role of Threat Intelligence in Cyber Fusion
Every organization has a different approach to building its security teams, tools, and processes. And because of these variations, the communication between each of them is not typically streamlined. To smoothen the communication and collaboration between tools, teams, and processes, organizations are embracing the concept of cyber fusion.

Cyber fusion is a unique approach to cybersecurity that combines several security functions such as threat intelligence, incident response, security automation, security orchestration, and others into a single connected unit. This provides an unprecedented level of collaboration across security teams for threat or incident detection and response. An important aspect of cyber fusion is the uninterrupted flow of analyzed, enriched, and actionable threat intelligence that is automatically fed into security and IT tools to foster intel-driven security operations. Cyber fusion makes threat intelligence actionable and reliable by connecting the dots between different threat parameters, trusted enrichment databases, and reported incidents. It fosters high confidence, actionable intel-driven SecOps by leveraging end-to-end threat intel automation. Above all, it improves an organization’s security posture and boosts threat response.

What is Threat Intelligence in Cybersecurity?

Security teams can consume and produce actionable and relevant threat intelligence to improve casework, provide context to suspicious behavior, and monitor particular threats. Furthermore, they can gain contextual intelligence on complex threat campaigns, discover attacker trajectories, and identify hidden threat patterns by linking incidents, threats, and threat intelligence in cybersecurity. 

Whether strategic or technical, all types of threat intelligence are consumed, analyzed, and acted upon in a cyber fusion security model. In simpler terms, threat intelligence plays one of the critical roles to unite the security processes through contextualization into delivering a unified response. While strategic intelligence involves human-analyzed and human-readable intelligence focussing on attacker trends, key attributions, or motivations of an incident, technical intelligence entails information related to the attack vector, indicators of compromise (IOCs) and indicators of behavior (IOB), including command and control domains, vulnerability exploits, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) among others.

When it comes to threat intelligence, cyber fusion technology works through a single layer of security orchestration to facilitate multi-source automated intelligence aggregation from internal and external sources. Furthermore, cyber fusion leverages strategic and technical threat intelligence for facilitating bi-directional human-to-human or machine-to-machine sharing of structured and unstructured threat intelligence in human-readable or machine-readable (STIX) standards. Different organizations such as private enterprises, managed security service providers (MSSPs), or computer emergency response teams (CERTs) can leverage the threat intelligence automation capabilities of cyber fusion centers to receive and share meaningful threat intelligence with their internal security teams or external partners such as vendors, information sharing communities, clients, and constituents, as the case may be. The automated bidirectional sharing workflow in cyber fusion is “end-to-end” which essentially means that the user entity can ingest threat intelligence from multiple sources including OSINT, commercial feed providers, dark web, and other structured and unstructured sources. After ingestion, the threat intelligence can be automatically normalized in a format-agnostic manner; enriched through external databases such as VirusTotal and Hybrid Analysis; correlated with logs captured in deployed SIEM platform and incidents reported in a case management tool. Finally, the threat intelligence is disseminated/shared with internal security teams and external partners while taking automated actions in the deployed SIEMs, firewalls, IPS/IDS, antivirus, and other deployed systems. 

The actioning of threat intelligence in cyber fusion centers goes beyond the limits of traditional SOCs that are plagued by restrictions owing to lack of cross-environment orchestration. In cyber fusion centers, environment-agnostic orchestration is leveraged to provide security teams with the much-needed capability to operationalize security workflows between cloud and on-premise deployed security technologies without exposing their network to malicious security threats. The end-to-end threat intelligence orchestration in cyber fusion ensures out-and-out threat intel readability, shareability, and actionability. By deploying a virtual cyber fusion center (vCFC), organizations can move toward a streamlined and centralized way of cyber threat intelligence and incident response

Benefits of Cyber Threat Intelligence-driven vCFC

As every security team manages different operations and deals with disparate tools, the implementation of streamlined threat intelligence sharing is essential. Cyber fusion empowers security teams to productively handle the daily dissemination of high-priority, relevant threat intelligence, enhancing an organization’s overall security readiness. Cyber fusion employs extensive security analytics, workflow orchestration and automation, and threat management capabilities to automate and expedite human efforts. 

By bringing together different teams, tools, and processes within an organization, cyber fusion improves actionability in threat intelligence, accelerates incident response, and reduces an organization’s cyber risks. A few of the unique use cases for cyber fusion include incident response management, malware management, vulnerability management, triage management, and case management.

In today’s constantly changing threat landscape, security teams need threat intelligence-driven incident response. To make this possible, cybersecurity organizations are building vCFCs that automatically ingest threat intelligence from internal and external sources to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats quickly. These cyber fusion centers allow security teams to take quick actions or alert them about any immediate crisis in real-time.

A cyber fusion center leverages innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the threat data collected from disparate sources. Designed with security automation and orchestration capabilities, a cyber fusion center aids in increasing the operational efficiency and effectiveness of security teams. 

Who can Embrace Threat Intelligence-driven vCFC?

Be it large or midsize organizations; everyone can leverage vCFCs to benefit from the threat intelligence framework. Organizations that do not have dedicated security teams or have very small security teams can also embrace vCFCs to foster threat intelligence-driven operations and secure their sensitive assets and data. Security teams who ingest and manually process threat data from information sharing communities (ISACs/ISAOs), commercial threat intelligence feed providers, OSINT sources, dark web, and others can also adopt a cyber fusion-driven approach to operationalize threat intelligence. By doing so, security teams can ingest, analyze, and act on relevant and enriched intelligence, and quickly detect threats and effectively respond in real-time.

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