The diverse use cases of threat intelligence make it an essential resource for cross-functional teams in any organization. Threat intelligence can take many forms depending on the initial objectives and the intended audience, but the idea is to get the data into a format that the audience will understand. Prior to joining Digital Guardian he helped launch Threatpost, an independent news site which is a leading source of information about IT and business security for hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. It should help defenders understand, in specific terms, how their organization might be attacked and the best ways to defend against or mitigate those attacks. Data, data, and more data. Although it’s perhaps the most immediately valuable when it helps you prevent an attack, threat intelligence is also a useful part of triage, risk analysis, vulnerability management, and wide-scope decision making. Cyber threat analysis and machine learning capabilities produce valuable insights. It gives specialized insights that help incident response teams understand the nature, intent, and timing of specific attacks. Today, even small organizations collect data on the order of millions of log events and hundreds of thousands of indicators every day. Machines alone cannot create operational threat intelligence. Email addresses, email subject, links and attachments: An example would be a phishing attempt that relies on an unsuspecting user clicking on a link or attachment and initiating a malicious command. Operational intelligence is most useful for those cybersecurity professionals who work in a SOC (security operations center) and are responsible for performing day-to-day operations. Threat intelligence is knowledge that allows you to prevent or mitigate those attacks. It’s a cycle because new questions and knowledge gaps could come up during the process which may generate new collection requirements. Ellen Wilson. Most cybersecurity organizations have at least six teams that can benefit from threat intelligence. What Threat Intelligence Tools Are Available? For each of these audiences, you need to ask: We believe that it is critically important to understand your overall intelligence priorities and the requirements of the security teams that will be consuming the threat intelligence. Chris Brook is the editor of Data Insider. Threat intelligence is data that is collected, processed, and analyzed to understand a threat actor’s motives, targets, and attack behaviors. If the cyber threat intelligence only has a threat data set of 10, it can only possibly proactively block 10 threats. It’s intended to inform high-level decisions made by executives and other decision makers at an organization — as such, the content is generally less technical and is presented through reports or briefings. Recorded Future events are language independent — something like “John visited Paris,” “John took a trip to Paris,” “Джон прилетел в Париж,” and “John a visité Paris” are all recognized as the same event. Download the 2020 Global Threat Report to uncover trends in attackers’ ever-evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures that our teams observed this past year. With so many cyber threats out there, threat intelligence can help organizations gain the information they need to identify and protect themselves against cyber threats. Cyber threat analysis is the process of assessing the cyber activities and capabilities of unknown intelligence entities or criminals. Other sources of information on specific attacks can come from closed sources like the interception of threat group communications, either through infiltration or breaking into those channels of communication. If you can’t patch in that timeframe, have a plan to mitigate the damage.