Significance of Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) for Growing Teams

Table of Contents

Why Do Mid-Market Companies Need Specifically Designed TIPs?

Capabilities of a TIP Built for Growing Teams

Commercial TIP vs MISP

Conclusion

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Significance of Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) for Growing Teams

  • Cyber Threat Intelligence

Posted on: August 16, 2021

Significance of Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) for Growing Teams
Mid-market organizations do not have large cybersecurity teams. There are usually no security teams or very small but growing. Likewise, they also do not have a hefty budget for security tools. However, given the changing nature of the cyber threat landscape, such organizations are facing an increasing number of cyberattacks and often serve as a conduit for attackers to penetrate large organizations through vendor supply chains. Hence, it has become extremely essential for such organizations to leverage threat intelligence. Given their limited budgets and lack of specialized teams, they cannot afford enterprise-standard threat intelligence platforms. However, such growing teams have now started to opt for threat intelligence platforms that are specifically designed for mid-market organizations. 

Why Do Mid-Market Companies Need Specifically Designed TIPs?

For growing teams, the need of the hour is a comprehensive, automated solution powered with in-built premium intelligence feeds and enrichment sources in a single platform. An all-in-one solution like this can automate the entire threat intelligence lifecycle to expedite a proactive defense against threats at a lower cost.

They can collect threat intelligence from multiple sources such as OSINT, dark web, ISACs/ISAOs, and others, ingest structured and unstructured threat intelligence in STIX format. With a specifically designed TIP at their disposal, such small teams can successfully automate end-to-end threat intel workflows, support custom confidence scoring for indicators, automatically update their SIEM records without writing complex playbooks, and execute automated actions in their security tools. 

Capabilities of a TIP Built for Growing Teams

Powered by cyber fusion, a true TIP can ingest tactical and technical intelligence from several external sources such as threat intel providers, peer organizations, ISACs/ISAOs, regulatory bodies, the dark web, and more. Using a TIP, small security teams can automatically convert, organize, and store threat data from multiple formats such as STIX, JSON, XML, MAEC, CybOX, and others. Moreover, such TIPs support the confidence scoring of IOCs when leveraged in a sharing environment and utilize them to perform actions such as automated alerting.

Using an advanced TIP, mid-market companies can leverage the MITRE ATT&CK framework to obtain information on threat actors’ TTPs, identify trends across the cyber kill chain, and report relevant intel. The cyber fusion capabilities of a TIP allow mid-market security teams to enrich threat data from several trusted sources to perform correlation, analysis, deduplication, and indicator deprecation in real-time. Furthermore, the cyber fusion capabilities enable small and mid-sized security teams to share threat data with other security tools for real-time actioning. 

Commercial TIP vs MISP

Akin to commercial TIPs designed for mid-market companies, MISP has the capabilities to manage threat sources and collection as well as automate IOC extraction. However, in contrast to MISP, commercial TIPs designed for growing teams can ingest threat intel from multiple sources, including RSS, TI feed providers, emails, ISACs/ISAOs, OSINT, dark web, and so on. Moreover, MISP does not support the STIX format for ingestion, normalization, and dissemination of threat information, unlike its counterpart.

Security teams at mid-market organizations can automate correlation and analysis of threat data by using TIPs whereas they need manual scripting to perform these tasks when leveraging MISP. Missing in MISP, the rules engine of a commercial TIP allows mid-market companies to automate response workflows in their deployed security architecture.

While a commercial TIP allows full format-agnostic file support, automated and configurable IOC scoring, and automated threat data sharing with security tools, ISACs, STIX/TAXII feed providers, all these are partially enabled via MISP. Both MISP and commercial TIPs leverage granular access controls, custom dashboards, open API, MITRE Attack Navigator, and tagging of threat objects. 

If your small and mid-sized security team wants to perform intel orchestration, they can leverage a full setup and ready-to-use TIP that provides out-of-the-box premium feeds and 24x7 enterprise product support. These unique features of commercial TIPs make it the right fit for mid-market companies.

Conclusion

Just like every other organization, mid-market companies have different needs when it comes to threat intelligence management. By using a commercial TIP, they can ingest, analyze, and act on relevant, enriched intelligence as well as detect threats faster.

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