Cyberattacks are never the same. The world, more constantly, has been beholding complex cyberattacks in recent years. It has been vastly fuelled by the rise of the internet itself as everything is connected with it. The nature of cyberattacks is changing as cybercriminals are rapidly upscaling and become less trackable. Any business, both small and large, can attract poor luck anytime if they undervalue protecting their data from potential cyberpunks. Cyber threat intelligence is critical for any business, especially large enterprises as they are spread out, simultaneously storing sensitive information in their system.
According to the report of Verizon Data Breach Investigation in 2018, it claimed 74% of data breaches caused people to share sensitive information by phishing or fraudulent emails.
Need of cyber threat intelligence
Cyber threat intelligence is usually responsible for grasping a better picture of any organisation’s past, present and future cyber threats. It enables them to build strategic decisions based on network security. It usually happens after a cyberattack has occurred.
They explored all the quests: Who’s attacking the organisation and why? Where are the system vulnerabilities? Figuring out all of the quests allow them to build blocks to any upcoming threats or come up with disaster-readiness plans.
The job of cyber threat intelligence involves following steps and the process is called the ‘intelligence cycle’.
- The first step requires them to collect reliable data sources.
- The next step is to identify or analyse raw data to deduce whether the threat is real or false.
- The following step is to share the threat with others through predefined internal and external channels If it is a real threat to the organization.
- The step is all about measuring steps that may help to prevent the threat.
- The final but most important step is to analyse your intelligence.
Types of threat intelligence
Cyber threat intelligence is categorised into four segments: strategic, tactical, technical and operational. Need to say, all forms of threat intelligence are crucial for a comprehensive threat assessment.
1. Strategic:
Strategic threat intelligence comes up with detailed analyses of trends and realises the possible outcomes that may arise for cyberattacks. They usually share information with board members of the organization through various channels such as whitepapers, policy documents and publications distributed within the industry.
2. Tactical:
Tactical threat independence is usually employed for protecting the network. Their job is mostly technical and provides details on the latest threats— what tactics or techniques, procedures are practiced by the specific attacker (s). They look for IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) and IP addresses for evidence, URLs, system logs to detect upcoming data breach attempts.
3. Technical:
The job of technical threat intelligence involves figuring technical clues such as phishing emails or Fraudulent URLs. Their work generally involves analyzing various social engineering attacks.
4. Operational:
Operational threat intelligence is shrewd enough that it can infiltrate hackers chat rooms. They are the adviser of IT defenders understanding the nature of cyberattacks, simultaneously explaining attackers’ intent, timing and uniqueness of the attacking individual or group.
