What are the Different Use Cases of a TIP?

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Unique Use Cases

Conclusion

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What are the Different Use Cases of a TIP?

  • Cyber Threat Intelligence

Posted on: July 19, 2021

What are the Different Use Cases of a TIP?
Whether it’s automating the collection, management, and dissemination of your threat intelligence or ensuring governance and collaboration, threat intelligence platform (TIP) is proving to be an unique value proposition for enterprises, resulting in higher degrees of efficiency and productivity. As organizations seek to level up their threat intelligence posture, having a TIP at disposal can be unprecedented as its use cases are manifold.

Unique Use Cases


Threat Intel Ingestion 

Security teams looking forward to automating alert aggregation and strategic and operational threat intelligence sharing can adopt an alert aggregation and information sharing platform that supports macro intel ingestion. Such a platform can automate ingestion and analysis of macro intel feeds, including threat research reports, finished intel reports, malware and regulatory advisories, and vulnerability reports.

By using a TIP, you can automatically ingest tactical threat intel from in-house security tools such as SIEMs, UEBA, IDS/IPS, Antivirus, and others. Moreover, your security teams can gather both tactical and technical intel from various external sources, including threat intel providers, peer organizations, regulatory bodies, dark web, ISACs, subsidiaries, and partner organizations. An advanced TIP supports micro threat intel ingestion, allowing you to automate ingestion and analysis of micro intel feeds, including IOCs, TTPs, ATT&CK mapping, exploit alert sharing, threat intel enrichment, and so on.

Threat Intelligence Enrichment

By using a top-notch TIP, security teams can enrich and correlate IOCs from various internal and external intel sources. Eventually, they can determine the final risk score of the IOCs and prioritize taking action on related intelligence. Based on a customizable confidence score, a modern TIP can filter out threat intelligence, block IOCs on internally-deployed security tools, and add them to the watchlist of a SIEM platform.

Threat Intelligence Analysis

An advanced TIP makes threat intelligence validation easier, enabling automated cross-correlations with threat sightings by peers, affiliates, and subsidiaries. Moreover, a TIP automates monotonous tasks, accelerates triage management, and enables security teams to focus on relevant tasks.

Threat Intelligence Lifecycle Automation

A modern-day TIP collects threat data from disparate sources and supports a wide range of formats, orchestrating all the threat information in a common and standard language. This feature allows TIPs to gather structured as well as unstructured threat information and convert it to various formats, such as STIX 1.x/2.0, XML, MAEC, YARA, MISP, CSV, PDF, JSON, OpenIOC, Email, and CybOX. You can ingest and normalize threat data from both internal and external sources to create actionable threat intelligence by using a TIP. Moreover, TIP offers the capability to organize that normalized data, sieve out unnecessary information, and compare it with curated information, identifying correlations and connecting the dots to determine hidden threat patterns.

Besides normalization and correlation, a TIP can enrich volumes of IOCs from trusted intel sources and remove false positives to add context to threat data. This enriched intelligence allows security operations center (SOC), incident response, and red teams to steer rapid analysis and action. You can calculate the IOC risk score and prioritize the relevant threat intel actioning. Based on the confidence score, you can analyze threat intelligence, block IOCs, and add them to the SIEM watchlist. Furthermore, security teams can automate threat intel dissemination. 

Integrated Governance and Collaboration 

TIP maintains the flow between synchronized activities and governance workflows via regular distribution of actionable threat intelligence to incident response, security operations center (SOC), vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), and threat hunting teams. It allows you to create tailored threat intel views for different teams in your organization, including analysts, CISO, and steering communities to ensure governance in security operations.This fosters collaboration between all these internal teams and key stakeholders, and enables them to engage in private group-level discussions, share threat insights and learnings, brainstorm issues, and much more. 

Bi-directional Threat Intel Sharing 

A top-notch TIP enables bidirectional sharing of strategic and technical threat intelligence. This enables security teams to receive and share threat information with ISACs/ISAOs, CERTs, commercial feed providers, clients, vendors, and others in real-time, which improves their understanding and response to cyber threats. Bi-directing threat intelligence sharing boosts every stakeholder’s knowledge about adversaries, assets, TTPs, IOCs, and much more. Through bi-directional threat intelligence sharing, security teams can gain contextual awareness of threats and can define relevant defense mechanisms. This fosters collaboration between security teams and empowers them to leverage intelligence for addressing different threats. 

Automated Alert aggregation and Dissemination

By using  a TIP, you can share human-readable threat alerts from internally deployed security tools as well as external sources. Moreover, a TIP allows security teams to aggregate custom threat intelligence feeds with early vulnerability- and malware-related warnings to provide actionable alerts to employees, peers, customers, vendors, and others. With an advanced TIP, you can experience machine-to-machine dissemination and actioning. It can enable your organization’s security operations by ingesting enriched, validated, and analyzed threat information. 

Threat Intelligence Actioning

By delivering enriched intelligence to incident response, threat hunting, internal security operations centers (SOCs), and red teams, TIPs help in quick threat intelligence actioning. Modern TIPs automate intel actioning by automatically disseminating enriched and analyzed threat data to security tools and blocking malicious IOCs on in-house security tools such as Firewalls, IDS/IPS, etc. 

Conclusion

A true TIP can ingest threat data from several sources and can automatically convert, organize, and store that data. They support unique algorithms boosting IOC confidence scoring and utilize enriched intelligence to automate dissemination and other actions. Such use cases make TIP the need of the hour.

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