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As businesses and organizations operate with more complex online systems, cyber threats are also becoming increasingly intricate and more advanced. To combat this problem, hiring a cyber intelligence company is the go-to solution for many firms.
These intelligence companies can help with identifying vulnerable spots in enterprise and third-party systems alike.
The insight that businesses gain from threat intelligence can go a long way in pinpointing vulnerable system points and can give the insight to keep things intact.
Unfortunately, most businesses lack the necessary understanding to make sense of the gathered data and to leverage the insight they compile from their sources. By using the best practices highlighted below, organizations will be able to collect, manage, and apply the info they’re gathering.
What are Cybersecurity Best Practices?
As mentioned above, threat intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing information in order to identify possible cyber breaches and devising defense plans.
As the digital landscape evolves with each passing day, keeping up with the newest trends might seem like a daunting and overwhelming task. However, with these five simple best practices, leveraging security data can become more streamlined and less confusing.
Threat Activity Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is key in data security. Cyber intelligence companies often offer tools and tactics that enable contours monitoring, helping identify risks in real-time, without any delay. On the other hand, it allows IT groups to devise a more proactive approach to data security.
Risk and Intelligence Management Integration
Integrating these two management systems should be helpful in creating a more extensive strategy. The threat intelligence solution you opt for should integrate well with your existing security protocols and risk management programs.
Have a Response Plan Ready
While building out your security program, you should also devise a response plan. How do you wish to act on data breaches once identified without a plan? Be prepared for everything and define how the defense operations take place, and lay out every necessary step to counter the attack efficiently.
Automate
Because it’s more or less impossible to handle and comb the data generated from several sources, automating threat intelligence data gathering allows your IT team to focus on more important tasks. This also helps reduce human errors, reducing risks falling through the cracks.
Demonstrating Value
Cyber intelligence companies understand that demonstrating ROI can be difficult when it comes to threat intelligence. However, teams should be able to demonstrate the value of these solutions and accompanied efforts when reporting to the enterprise’s board. A key factor here is determining the actual technical skill level of the board and presenting the reports in a tangible way that’s easy to understand for everyone.
What is They Cyber Threat Intelligence Process
As you have probably guessed, a reliable cyber intelligence company works with circular processes, or intelligence cycles, rather than an implemented end-to-end process. The data is first being collected, implemented, and lastly, evaluated. The results are thoroughly examined to create intelligence that is later further analyzed and re-evaluated in different contexts, like consumer feedback and new information.
The intelligence analysis stage is based on rigorous analytical techniques that scrutinize every aspect of said intelligence.
This circular process helps identify gaps in the intelligence and presents experts new unanswered questions, prompting improved collection criteria. This, in turn, makes the process more and more efficient and re-focused every time.
What are some traditional forms of threat intelligence?
Experts differentiate four main types of threat intelligence.
- Strategic: This approach examines all current trends and newly emerging risks to create an overall picture of possible cyberattacks and their consequences.
- Technical: This threat intelligence gives a better idea about what they should be looking for. IT focuses on technical clues, like fraudulent URLs and phishing emails. Technical threat intelligence is in constant change, as hackers change their approaches frequently, trying different techniques to hack into well-secured systems.
- Tactical: This type of threat intelligence focuses on the approach of hackers, analyzing procedures, techniques, and tactics (or TTPs). This helps identify the ways how hackers might attack the systems. Looking at IP addresses, URLs, they determine the weakest Indicators of Compromise (IOCs).
- Operational: A cyber intelligence company uses operational threat intelligence to better understand the nature of specific attacks. This approach looks at factors like timing, nature, intent, and the skill of the hackers. This form can help IT teams determine why the breach took place and how. Also, it can give away further clues about potential upcoming attacks, and can even help pinpoint high-risk industries, niches, and systems.
What are the sources of threat intelligence?
As already mentioned, experts collect cyber data from different sources to maximize their knowledge and defense systems. When looking at these sources, broadly speaking, they could be put into two different categories.
- External: These are the sources that come from outside of the company or organization. They encapsulate a wide range of “sub-sources’’, like open-source, publicly available origins, like new reports, blogs, public blocklists, and so on. These sources may also be private or commercial. Software solution providers, different vendors, corporate sharing groups – simply put, every party which has agreed to pool information on possible cyber threats.
- Internal: These sources are those within the enterprise’s own networks. IT groups examine firewall logs, application and event logs, DNS logs, and a wide range of other sources. Also, internal sources can serve as great anchors. They can include information about systems that have been previously affected by cyberattacks, highlighting peculiar vulnerabilities and compromised areas.
Conclusion
As we said before, with continuous technological advancements, the nature of cyberattacks will also become more intricate and sophisticated. In order to keep business assets safe, organizations should take cyber intelligence seriously and make sure that they have the proper resources to combat any potential threat. These five simple best practices can help you get started with implementing a more elaborate security protocol.
Apart from that, companies should have in-house experts who can monitor security and make sure that all vulnerabilities are remedied. Apart from that, educating employees on cyber attacks can go a long way in ensuring that your systems are safe and secure.
