By understanding the “who, what, why, and how” of cyber threats relevant to their specific environment, organisations can significantly improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks, ultimately reducing risk and minimizing potential damage.

Threat intelligence refers to the information an organisation collects, processes, and analyses to understand the capabilities, intentions, and attack methods of cyber adversaries. It provides crucial context around potential and existing threats, allowing organisations to make informed decisions about their security posture and proactively defend their assets. The key to leveraging this valuable information lies in its effective usage, as we’ll explore in the tips below.

Smart Ways to Use Threat Intelligence for Better Security

If companies want to stop breaches and attacks, they often buy a threat intelligence platform (TIP). These platforms come in different forms, like cloud-based services or tools that work together to manage risk. They help with finding threats, responding to incidents, and managing weaknesses. To use these tools well, you need to know what they can and can’t do, match them to your own setup, and connect them with your other security tools.

Some common mistakes include not having a good risk management plan, using bad threat intelligence, gathering the wrong information, and not choosing the right tools carefully.

Focus on Good Intelligence, Not Just Lots of It

First, check the threat feeds you’re using as sources. Don’t just look at the total number of feeds. Instead, understand what data is being collected and how the TIP puts these threats together, adds extra information, and organizes them in a way that’s easy to search.

Part of this process is also getting rid of duplicate threats and filtering out false positives or irrelevant data. For example, if you don’t use certain Windows versions, you don’t need a threat feed full of them. Many TIPs use automated and AI-based methods to filter their feeds. This can be good and bad: you might get more data, but also more noise to sort through.

Don’t Get More Intel Than You Need

The most advanced TIP might be too much if you have a small security team or a simple computer setup. Threat feeds should match your own environment in terms of how diverse and complex potential threats are compared to your clouds and endpoints.

This means being able to see threats from both the virtual and physical parts of your infrastructure. Understanding the threat landscape involves looking at the external and internal factors that allow threats to happen.

How to Manage Your Post-Incident Workflow

The best TIPs can manage responses and actions to stop threats and fix problems. The value of threat intelligence depends on how well it is received, processed, prioritized, and acted upon. This means carefully connecting it to your existing security tools (SOARs, SIEMs, and XDRs). You need to embed the TIP into your security system, making sure to connect your internal data and use your vulnerability management tools to improve your incident response and get useful analytics.

The key word here is “actionable.” Often, threat intel doesn’t lead to any actions, like updating systems or securing a network segment.

Being actionable also means paying attention to timing. First, the intel should shorten the time between finding a threat and fixing it, as exploits happen faster. Second, the intel should help you understand which threats are happening in real time and which ones can be stopped quickly.

Actionable intelligence helps you visualize potential threats. Being able to act on intelligence directly within a visual environment is critical for analysts to be more efficient and effective. Visual analysis helps analysts see patterns and connections that might be hard to find in tables of data.

To effectively use threat intelligence in your security operations, it’s helpful to categorise it:

• Strategic: Understanding broader trends and insights.
• Tactical: Examining the details of specific threats.
• Operational: Analysing threats in real or near real-time.

Successfully defending your systems requires attention to all three areas. It’s also vital that different security teams communicate and act on intelligence together, rather than working separately. For instance, while one phishing email might seem like a minor tactical issue, a TIP could reveal a pattern indicating a larger, operational attack, highlighting the importance of context.

Try KELA for the TIP

If this seems like a lot of work, that’s because it is. TIPs are not simple products to evaluate or use, and managing threats means considering all entry points to your infrastructure, applications, and servers.

An excellent threat intelligence platform (TIP) is Kela. Cybersecurity professionals from CREAPLUS can help in diving into the threat intelligence field and making the most of these powerful tools.