Strategic Threat Intelligence: Why Sharing Is Crucial?

Table of Contents

What is Strategic Threat Intelligence?

Need for Strategic Threat Intelligence

Sources of Strategic Threat Intel

Significance of Strategic Threat Intel

The Bottom Line

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Strategic Threat Intelligence: Why Sharing Is Crucial?

  • Cyber Threat Intelligence

Posted on: May 27, 2021

Strategic Threat Intelligence: Why Sharing Is Crucial?
With so much of our lives connected to the internet nowadays, the odds of your data being compromised by a cyber attack are astronomical. Because of this heightened cybersecurity threat, the importance of strategic threat intelligence in cybersecurity has also never been higher. 

With the growing sophistication and rising scale of cyberattacks, threat intelligence sharing has become an integral part of sound cybersecurity operations. Sharing threat intel helps detect trends and patterns needed to defend against cyber threats. However, threat intel is not a single discipline for handling a threat actor. There are four primary disciplines:

  • Strategic Threat Intelligence
  • Tactical Threat Intelligence
  • Operational Threat Intelligence
  • Technical Threat Intelligence 

In this blog, we dive into strategic intelligence gathering, including why it's important and how it can help prevent cyber threats. 


What is Strategic Threat Intelligence?

Strategic threat intelligence gathers information on different cyber threats, as well as potential threat actor tactics that change over time. This paints a broader picture of your overall threat landscape, giving you a bird's eye view rather than the specific threat data on a certain cyber attack.  

Strategic intelligence is exclusively non-technical and is consumed by security decision-makers. This type of threat intel is employed during the phase of the threat intelligence lifecycle where you’re making high-level decisions and thus, it is generated as an on-demand cyber intelligence report. 

Real-time strategic threat intelligence provides an answer to the question: Given an organization’s technical threat landscape, what’s the worst that could happen? Some examples of strategic threat intelligence include policy documents, whitepapers, and industrial publications. It also provides a view into major trends and ways to reduce the risk profile of an enterprise. 

With this information, security professionals can profile their adversaries and gain insights into their tactics and future threats.

As an example, let's look at a situation where an adversary makes a shift in behavior. They may be increasingly abusing legitimate processes or a similar cyber risk. With access to strategic threat intelligence, your security operations can gain actionable insight into designing a strategy to counter this emerging threat. 


Need for Strategic Threat Intelligence

All strategic cyber threat intelligence must meet the following three criteria:

  • Critical information needs - what kind of information is required to form strategic decisions?
  • Priority intelligence needs - what information on the external environment is required?
  • Friendly forces information needs - what is the organization’s security posture related to its assets of value?

A security team must fulfill these needs and integrate actionable insights into network security for tenable decisions. 


Sources of Strategic Threat Intel

Most sources for strategic threat intel are open sources, implying that anyone can gain access to them. Some of them include local and national media, industry-specific publications, policy documents from groups of interest, online activity, comments, and articles from people of interest, and content produced by security organizations

While strategic intel sources are ubiquitous, the raw data garnered from them is massive and hence, requires analysts to manually sift through them to identify actionable threat intel. Nevertheless, with the right tools, analysts can dodge these challenges. Robust threat intel solutions can go through these humongous volumes of raw data, finding actionable intelligence in real time. With the right kind of tool, organizations can detect, process, and understand relevant security information in real time.


Significance of Strategic Threat Intel

Strategic threat intel has various uses. Some of them have been listed below:

  • Inform leadership about high-risk threats, pertinent risk scenarios, and a criminal's underground.
  • Conduct an extensive risk analysis and review of the technology supply chain.
  • Learning about commercial vendors, ventures, technology products, and partners that can increase or reduce risks to an enterprise environment.
  • Strategic intel also serves as a good serving point for determining the most effective defense measures: a) major Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) over a period, b) charting cyberattacks to geopolitical conflicts, and c) global statistics on malware, breaches, and information theft.


The Bottom Line

The eventual aim of an organization’s strategic threat intel capacity is to decrease threats posed to the organization’s assets of value and critical mission. In order to attain this, firms should develop and maintain requirements that direct threat intel resources to their security needs. A strategic assessment of an organization’s flaws and threats assists in the evaluation of potential effects in the case of an incident.

In today’s threat scenario, strategic threat intelligence plays a critical role in defending companies and governments by offering the required intelligence against threats that can cripple both the security and economy.

With the Cyware Threat Intelligence Platform, your organization’s security isn’t left in the dark. Participate in intelligence sharing for robust threat hunting, or use our threat intelligence feeds to create strategies based on the entire threat landscape. 

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