Threat intelligence is the information that a business or other organization uses to identify potential cybersecurity threats that it will face. Professionals look into these potential threats so that they can be prepared for a breach to take place pre-emptively. This means that the organization can install antiviral and malware-combatting software, back up necessary data, and stop valuable resources from being stolen or lost.
To say that there is a lot of digital data around the world would be a vast understatement. In fact, there are approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated online each day!
Because there is so much data on the web, it's critical that your business use threat intelligence software to keep your data safe. There are a lot of opportunities for cybersecurity breaches, after all, so you can never be too safe.
Digital solutions that your business invests in will gather data about potential threats. They look into what breaches have previously occurred in similar digital systems to yours, analyze what parts of your software are most susceptible to attacks, and wire it into threat intel feeds and managing reports for your business. Experts can then use these reports to select security solutions that will best work to protect company data.
While threat intelligence sounds great, you're likely wondering what makes it superior to other methods of keeping data secure.
The answer to this lies in preparation. Analyzing risk and potential issues allows you to fight proactively against the threats that you're most susceptible to. Without identifying what these threats are, you're liable to waste time fighting against perceived threats that are extremely likely to realistically happen.
This is especially the case since common cybersecurity breaches are always changing. Using threat intelligence and analysis helps you to keep up-to-date with the overwhelming amount of new threats that hackers and malware are using to compromise data. It shows you the methods, targets, and major vulnerabilities that threats are looking for in the present. You won't be looking at outdated statistics or data when deciding what security measures to invest in.
Finally, it's just generally a good idea to stay informed about what's going on in the digital world. With so much of your information on the Cloud, a single breach can cause a lot of damage. Stolen personal information and lost profits will be a huge blow to both your employees and your business, so knowing the possible dangers is critical.
Now that you know what threat intelligence is and why it matters, let's take a look at the four main types of analyses. Strategic, tactical, technical, and operational intelligence all work together to keep your business safe on all fronts. Read on to learn more about these reports!
Strategic Intelligence
Strategic intelligence of cybersecurity threats is a broad term. It usually is reserved for less technical audiences and uses detailed trend/risk analyses to create a full picture of both the risks and possible ramifications of a cyberattack. It's intended to show the worst that can happen in the event of a security breach and therefore looks at broad impacts of threats.
Tactical Intelligence
Tactical threat intelligence is a bit more technical and specific than strategic intelligence is - it's meant to go to the people within an organization who focus specifically on protecting data and network information. It gives specific details on the tactics, procedures, and techniques of threat actors. Its primary purpose is helping organizations identify how hackers go about breaching data so experts can figure out how to combat these methods most efficiently.
Technical Intelligence
Technical intelligence, as you likely guessed, is 100% for a technical audience. It looks into the technical clues that indicate that a threat may be beginning to compromise an organization, including phishing messages and viruses having installed themselves into machinery. This lets people know when a business is most susceptible to a breach so that experts can focus more energy on reducing its impact.
Operational Intelligence
Operational cyberintelligence is specifically engineered for IT professionals. It helps them understand the way that specific cyberattacks work by discussing intent, timing, nature, and knowledge level of the hackers. This is the level of intelligence that can infiltrate hacker's private messages, so it's overall pretty comprehensive.
There are a multitude of situations that threat intelligence can be used for. Let's look into some real-life use cases for this data.
The Ardagh Group, a glass/metal manufacturing company, has a locally-protected agile framework. It becomes quite hard to manage all of the Cloud platforms and connected devices because there are many of them in the 22 nations that the company operates in.
Ardagh Group wanted to use AI-powered threat detection software to find attackers all around the world. It invested in threat intelligence software with Vectra Security and detected many hidden threats and anomalies. Because of the automated process they created, threat investigation around the globe was simplified for them.
Another use case is open, deep, and dark web monitoring. Many companies like the Brunswick Corporation look into data enrichment and incident responses to detect malware all across the net. They partnered with Cisco and made sure that their cybersecurity tactics matched up with current best practices, which ultimately bolstered its security.
Discover how Zero Trust segmentation can help protect your organization.