What is Cyber Threat Intelligence and its Role

Cyber intelligence is the analysis and detection of threats that can compromise the business elements and security of agencies and organizations at any level by gathering threats from electronic media. It is intelligence that allows agencies and organizations to take early action by identifying the target, method or type of attacker as a result of the analysis.

When we look at recent data breaches that we have encountered, we find that preventive measures taken during or after a cyber attack are not always effective. Due to the rapidly evolving cyber world we live in and technology, new threats are encountered at all times and organizations can be subject to hundreds of cyber attacks at any given time.

It is not easy to track cybercriminals and their methods of targeting critical systems in the Internet world, and there are already situations where large amounts of data requiring large amounts of money must be dealt with. And at this point, the concept of cyber intelligence was born and began to play an important role in cyber attacks.

1. Cyber threat intelligence

A cyber threat is the unauthorized access of a malicious person or group to a management system device or network, disrupting the network structure or rendering it unusable. Cyber threats can come from a variety of people, agencies and organizations. To give a typical example of these people, it would be:

a. Hackers

b. Terrorists

c. Business competitors

d. Spies

e. State and intelligence agencies

f. Unhappy employees

g. Organized crime groups

The actions taken by the cyber threat sources I mentioned above that cause harm are called cyber threats. These threats create an idea of the kind of scenario that malicious people will follow when attacking their targets.

2. Examples of cyber threats

Malware, spyware, ad-embedded malware, man-in-the-middle attacks, distributed denial of service, ransomware, botnets, phishing attacks data leaks, worms, keyloggers, backdoors, advanced persistent threats.

3. Cyber threat intelligence is the field of cybersecurity

Cyber threat intelligence focuses on collecting and analyzing data about current and ongoing attacks that threaten the security of an institution, organization, or asset. The benefit of cyber threat intelligence is that it prevents data breaches and saves financial costs. Its purpose is to demonstrate, analyze, and protect against threats to institutions, organizations, and themselves.

Cyber Threat Intelligence aims to uncover the thoughts and aims, methods and means of attackers by analyzing the information collected. Cyber threat intelligence is a viable solution. Therefore, timely actions can be taken and prepared for possible threats.

What is the use of threat intelligence?

1. Security model breakthrough and improvement

Threat intelligence-based defense thinking is threat-centric, so it requires a comprehensive understanding of the threats to critical facilities and the establishment of a new and efficient security defense system. Such a security defense system often requires security personnel to have an in-depth understanding of attack tactics, methods and behavioral patterns, a comprehensive understanding of potential security risks, and to do so in a targeted manner.

2. Emergency detection and active defense

Based on threat intelligence data, you can constantly create signatures of malicious code or behavioral characteristics, or generate rules for products such as NFT (Network Forensic Tool), SIEM/SOC (Security Information and Event Management/Security Management Center), ETDR (Endpoint Threat Detection and Response), to achieve emergency detection of attacks. If the threat intelligence is IP, domain name, URL and other specific Internet access attribute information, it can also be applied to various online security devices to block and defend against existing attacks in real time.

3. Security analysis and incident response

Security threat intelligence can make security analysis and incident response work easier and more efficient. For example, threat intelligence can be relied on to distinguish different types of attacks and identify potential APT high-risk level attacks, so as to achieve timely response to attacks; threat intelligence can be used to predict the possible malicious behavior caused by existing attack clues, so as to achieve rapid delineation of the scope of the attack; threat intelligence can be established to search, so as to achieve accurate mining of security clues.

Related: The dilemma of open source threat intelligence in cyberspace