Businesses are evaluating and transforming them into different worlds at double speed today. As enterprises use AI, the risk of cyber-attacks increases. Threat Intelligence Management helps companies understand the potential risks of security. They help them know how to save themselves from cyber security issues. So, if you run a company, especially an AI office, this article will help you see what threat intelligence management is. And how it saves your company’s essential data from cyber attacks. And also which security measures you should follow.
What Does Threat Intelligence Do? Threat Intelligence Importance
Threat intelligence plays a vital role in protecting your essential data. It helps you to analyze who can attach to your basic system. Threat intelligence analyzes the different Types of cyber security Attacks. Organizations save themselves from future attachment, which helps them to save their financial loss and reputational damage.
Types Of Threat Intelligence
Technical Threat Intelligence
It includes all the specific details about cyber threats. It may contain information like how attackers attack your system, how they enter it, which weakness they exploit, or which type of malware they use for attacks. The security team collects this data from an open-source feed to make immediate decisions about new threats and investigate any security incidents. It helps organizations to protect themselves from attackers.
Strategic Threat Intelligence
Company leaders benefit from strategic threat intelligence, which reveals a broader perspective of existing threats and supports their tactical decisions. This threat intelligence type examines overall information about industry regulations, compliance requirements & cybersecurity risk tendencies, although it avoids technical specifics. Strategic Threat Intelligence enables leaders to predict potential dangers before budget-making and new regulatory adaptation.
Tactical Threat Intelligence
The main area of focus for Tactical Threat Intelligence consists of attacker operational methods. This form of intelligence supplies valuable information about existing methods through which cybercriminals attempt system intrusions. Law enforcement and security agencies monitor typical phishing attacks, malware behavioral patterns, and dangerous website information for their threat intelligence data. The information helps security teams perform defense tests to identify vulnerabilities that need repair.
Operational threat intelligence
The operational threat intelligence stream delivers lettable information regarding distinct threats that detail their targets, their methods of attack, and the timing of their operations. Operational Threat Intelligence focuses on providing information about cyber attacks, which contain more than technological details, by concentrating on human involvement.
The operational intelligence basis stems from hacker forum activity and malicious actors' social media activities. The obtained information enables security teams to take proactive measures for attack prevention alongside rapid attack response.
What are the five stages of threat intelligence?
Stage 1: Setting & Directions
Organizations need to make sure their goals are met and understand their needs. It simply means they need to identify their essential assets and weaknesses and what kind of threats they face. It identifies intelligence needs, which means an organization needs information to stay safe.
Also, they help companies understand which assets are essential for staying safe. Cybersecurity attackers always find out about data collection. First, they set priority for data collection. This stay also ensures the required time and money for the specific task.
Stage 2: Get Collection
After giving direction to your organization, the next phase includes getting information about protection threats from various sources. You can get the data from human thinking and technical resources.
- Technical Tools Include:
- Network Sensors
- Firewalls
- Email security logs (it is like a camera catching suspicious activities.)
Human Thinking & Analysis Include:
- Reports From Research
- Industry forums government advertisers.
Phase 3: Organize all the data
It’s like digital archaeology; processing raw intelligence is getting in there, looking through the piles of footnotes, citations, and bibliographies to see what you can find out. This process is being transformed today by modern AI systems that, in turn, transform chaos into clarity. They are meant to standardize data format, reduce such data redundancy, and improve findings with all the important context. They also analyze which pieces of information are credible and which are not.
Now think of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica affair. They had to go through enormous amounts of user interaction data, app permissions, and API calls. By cleaning and organizing the information, they revealed that the personal data being collected and misused was greater than ever before.
Phase 4: Analyze Insight
The shift to analysis opens up opportunities in the field of cyber detection. In this area, experts use technology to change what data processors call processed data into information that they or you can understand. Security analysts use complex tools to conduct pattern identification, damage risk assessment, and anticipation of future threats. They figure out what happened and why it happened and imagine what will be next.
Take the 2022 Lapsus attacks. Security workers studied the gang’s methods on numerous victims, from Okta to NVIDIA. This complete analysis indicated their preference for social engineering and insider threats. It enables organizations to strengthen their human-centered security measures.
Phase 5: Sharing Intelligence
Finally, the last one is intelligence sharing, which needs technical precision & good language. The same information is necessary; however, various stakeholders require different perspectives. Business risks and resource implications must be known to senior management. Security teams require detailed technical indicators, but you need specific configuration directions. Legal teams focus on compliance issues and any potential risks they may face.
Quickly sharing information between government agencies, cybersecurity companies, & operators of critical infrastructure helped reduce the damage from the Colonial Pipeline incident. It also helped prevent similar attacks on other targets. The key was to tailor the message for each audience and ensure the information was accurate and easy to act on.
Threat Intelligence Challenges & Their Solutions
Too Much Data
It's hard for a company to find just one search result among millions of data. The security team also has to deal with a lot of data, which sometimes becomes tricky. This is a primary concern regarding AI threat intelligence. The only solution to avoid this is for the company to focus only on the most relevant data that could pose security threats.
Hard To Understand
They don't have enough data to understand the background link of any suspicious data. For example, if an IP address is open, they must check its background and whether it is connected to a hacker. Immediate data collection is not usually possible for this. So, this is a challenge that threat intelligence often has to face.
Do check Enough Resources
A company can face security issues from various sources, and to stay safe from threats, they need to seek help from different resources. If they only depend on one or two resources, they won't be able to gather enough information. Companies should use other sources of information, such as government authorities, public information, and their security tools.
Centralize Data
Unfortunately, many organizations have difficulty making sense of all this information. If they try processing alone, it will take too much time and not leave too much room for action. Without a central system that collects and groups all the data to leave no stone unturned, there is no way to miss insights entirely. That makes it much harder to take raw data, making it worthwhile information that helps security decisions.
The answer is for the company to migrate all its data into one system and process the data quickly with the help of automated tools. Furthermore, they should seek to gather the most pertinent news regarding their industry and direction. Using additional sources and dealing with data better enables organizations to protect themselves from cyberattacks and react quicker should a threat arise.
Conclusion
THREAT INTELLIGENCE MANAGEMENT is the cognitive shield your company takes against cyber threats. If implemented correctly, the five stages, combined with strategic solutions to common challenges, will enable your business to transform raw data into actionable security insights. Organizations from all walks of life can strive to protect themselves against current cyber threats, but also be ready with a proactive approach to help look towards the future with professionally developed cyber solutions.