What Is Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)?

Strategic Intelligence

Strategic threat intelligence (STI) comes from high-level analysis of broad cybersecurity trends and how they might affect an organization. It offers insights about threat actors' motives, capabilities, and targets, and helps executives and decision-makers outside of IT understand potential cyber threats. Typically less technical and incident-specific than other types of CTI, strategic threat intelligence is often used to formulate risk management strategies and programs to mitigate the impact of future cyberattacks.

Tactical Intelligence

As the name implies, tactical threat intelligence (TTI) focuses on threat actors’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and seeks to understand how a threat actor might attack an organization. Tactical threat intelligence also explores threat vulnerabilities using threat hunting, which proactively searches for initially undetected threats within an organization’s network. TTI is more technical than STI and is typically used by IT or SOC teams to enhance cybersecurity measures or improve incident response plans.

Operational Intelligence

More detailed, incident-specific, and immediate than STI and TTI, operational threat intelligence (OTI) is real-time data used to facilitate timely threat detection and incident response. CISOs, CIOs, and SOC members often utilize OTI to identify and thwart likely attacks.

What Data Is Considered Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence encompasses a wide range of information to provide organizations with insights into past, current, and potential future cyber threats. The data considered a part of threat intelligence includes:

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs): Observable data points that indicate a potential breach or malicious activity. Examples include:

• IP addresses associated with malicious activity.
• URLs or domain names of phishing sites.
• Malware hashes or file signatures.
• Email addresses or subjects linked to phishing campaigns.

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs): Descriptive details on threat actors’ operations, which can include:

• Specific methods used to gain initial access.
• Techniques for maintaining persistence.
• Ways they escalate privileges or move laterally within a network.

Security teams map TTPs to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to build threat models, improve detections, and enhance automated defenses. Tracking TTPs enables organizations to anticipate evolving adversary behavior and strengthen cloud security strategies.

Threat Actor Profiles: Information on groups or individuals responsible for cyberattacks, including:

• Their motivations (financial gain, espionage, activism, etc.).
• Capabilities and skill levels.
• Past campaigns or incidents attributed to them.

Vulnerability Information: Details about known weaknesses in software or hardware that can be exploited, such as:

• Vulnerability identifiers (e.g., CVE numbers).
• Affected systems or software.
• Potential impact and mitigation strategies.

Social Media and Dark Web Data: Information from online forums, social media platforms, or the dark web where threat actors might communicate, share tools, or sell stolen data.

Sources of Threat Intelligence

Sources for threat intelligence are almost as varied as the cybersecurity landscape itself. The more common sources for CTI include:

• Internal data: information an organization gathers from its own data, network logs, incident responses, etc.
• Open-source intelligence (OSINT): information from resources considered public domain.
• Closed-source services: information not available to the general public.
• Information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs): business sector-specific organizations that collect, analyze, and share actionable threat information with member organizations.
• Government advisories: information released by agencies like the FBI (USA), the National Cyber Security Centre (UK), or the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).
• Deep and dark web intelligence: encrypted and anonymous information that provides information regarding cybercrime and activity, early warnings of impending attacks, and insights about cybercriminals’ motives and methods.

Leveraging External and Internal Threat Intelligence

CTI from internal and external sources offers different, yet equally important, insights regarding an organization’s threat landscape.

Analysis of internal data creates “contextual CTI” that helps an organization identify and confirm the most relevant threats based on individual circumstances, business systems, products and services. Reviewing information from past incidents can reveal indicators of compromise (IOCs), detail the cause and effect of a breach, and provide opportunities to improve incident response plans. Internal CTI also creates a greater understanding of an organization’s vulnerabilities, allowing CISOs and SOCs to develop more tailored and targeted cybersecurity measures.

External CTI provides the insights needed to stay ahead of current and upcoming threat actors. From global TTPs to sector-specific intelligence from sources like ISACs and industry peer groups, external CTI increases threat awareness and improves an organization’s ability to create a more powerful cybersecurity program.

The Value of Intelligence-Driven Data in Threat Detection

A crucial element in any cyber threat detection and response program, intelligence-driven data fuels a proactive defense posture that helps organizations better understand their vulnerabilities, anticipate cyber threats, focus resources on the most significant threats, and develop an incident response plan that will minimize the impact of cyber attacks.

Intelligence-driven data can also provide a deeper understanding of risk management and compliance issues reducing potential financial and reputational damage resulting from a data breach.

Tools and Services in Threat Intelligence

You'll find a growing range of tools for generating cyber threat intelligence, each with unique forms and functions to fit an organization’s cybersecurity needs.

Combining the functions of several tools and threat intelligence platforms creates the most complete and thorough threat detection and prevention program.

An Overview of Threat Intelligence Tools and Their Functions

• Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): automatically collect, aggregate, and analyze external threat data.
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems: collect and analyze internal threat data composed of system logs, event data, and other contextual sources.
• Threat Intelligence Feeds: provide real-time streams of information related to current or ongoing cyber threats, often focused on a particular area of interest (IP addresses, domains, malware signatures, etc.).
• Sandboxing Tools: provide controlled environments in which organizations can analyze or open potentially dangerous files or programs without risk to the organization’s internal systems.
• Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Tools: gather data from public sources (social media, blogs, open discussion forums, etc.).
• Intrusion detection systems (IDS): monitor network traffic, identify threats, and provide intelligence for threat response.
• Intrusion prevention systems (IPS): analyze threats, block attacks in real time, and enhance threat intelligence.
• Cloud Detection and Response (CDR): analyzes threats in the cloud environment, providing real-time intelligence and automated mitigation.

Threat Intelligence Services: How They Enhance Cybersecurity

Threat intelligence services support organizations’ cybersecurity efforts by providing CISOs and SOCs the tools to develop and optimize cyber threat analysis, prevention, and recovery programs. Effective CTI support increases overall threat awareness, enables proactive defense measures, enhances incident response plans, and improves decision-making and risk management.

The Role of Incident Response in a Threat Intelligence Program

An incident response plan (IRP) serves several purposes in a threat intelligence program. An IRP outlines how an organization will react to and recover from a cyber security incident. In addition to ensuring an organization’s preparedness for a cyber attack, a well-planned IRP will provide various types of threat intelligence that can be used to improve future cybersecurity measures.

Practical Implementation of Threat Intelligence

The practical implementation of cyber threat intelligence begins with defining clear objectives and gathering relevant data from a variety of internal and external sources. Once analyzed, the data can be used to generate actionable intelligence designed to integrate into the existing cybersecurity program.

Integrating Threat Intelligence into Your Cybersecurity Strategy

Applying the insights from your CTI program to your overall cybersecurity strategy will enhance threat awareness, attack prevention, and incident response. It is important to note that this integration may require adapting existing processes, adjusting control measures, updating plans, or modifying user training programs.

Threat Hunting: A Proactive Approach to Cybersecurity

Sophisticated hackers can infiltrate a network and remain undetected while searching for or collecting data, login credentials, or other sensitive materials. Threat hunting is the practice of proactively searching for previously undetected cyber threats on an internal network. Threat hunting is crucial for eliminating advanced persistent threats (APTs).

The Threat Intelligence Lifecycle: An Overview

The threat intelligence lifecycle is an outline of the process by which CISOs develop and implement cyber threat intelligence programs. It is a framework for continuously transforming raw threat data into actionable threat intelligence that can then be utilized to identify and avoid threats to an organization’s cybersecurity.

Understanding the Stages of the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle

1. Discovery: discover threat intelligence data (indicators, adversary tactics, tools, etc.) from various sources, which can include internal investigations and sources, threat intel feeds, partnerships, other open-source threat intelligence (OSINT).
2. Collection: Once threat intelligence data is discovered, collect and store that data for additional processing and analysis.
3. Processing: clean up data to remove duplicates, inconsistencies, and irrelevant information. Then transform raw data into a format suitable for analysis, and enhance with additional context and metadata.
4. Analysis: conduct in-depth analysis of the processed data to identify patterns, trends, and potential threats, and employ various techniques to uncover hidden insights. Then evaluate the credibility and impact of identified threats.
5. Action: prepare and distribute actionable intelligence to relevant stakeholders, including incident response teams, the SOCs, DevSecOps teams, and executives. Ensure to tailor the information to the specific needs of different audiences so it’s concise and clear.
6. Feedback Loop: capture feedback from key stakeholders on the effectiveness and relevance of the provided threat intelligence. Then continuously refine and improve the collection, processing, analysis and processes based on feedback and lessons learned.

This lifecycle ensures organizations maintain proactive defense postures by continuously adapting intelligence to on-premises and cloud-native attack vectors and adversary behaviors.

Building an Effective Threat Intelligence Program

More than finding the right tools and searching for data, building an effective CTI program requires a strategy-driven plan, a team of specialists, well-organized processes, and an organization-wide commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

Key Steps in Setting Up a Threat Intelligence Program

• Defining goals and objectives.
• Allocating resources and appropriately skilled staff.
• Implementing processes for relevant data collection.
• Developing methodologies for data analysis and intelligence generation.
• Integrating and utilizing intelligence in cybersecurity programs.
• Defining formats for disseminating intelligence.
• Gathering and reviewing feedback.
• Ensuring compliance and adherence to industry standards, regulations, and internal governance policies.

The Importance of Continuous Learning and Adaptation in Threat Intelligence

The cyber threat landscape continuously changes as threat actors become more knowledgeable and sophisticated. An effective CTI program can only remain effective if it is as dynamic as the threats it is designed to thwart. Learning from previous incidents and threat intelligence feedback allows organizations to continuously adapt and enhance the elements of a CTI program, keeping it as relevant and effective as possible.

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