To protect your assets and ensure the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of your business in the digital world, it’s critical to acquire information about possible and ongoing cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks can not only harm your company’s reputation, but espionage can also cost you millions of dollars in the event of a cyber-attack. As a result, it’s critical to gather threat intelligence and plan for an assault ahead of time before a threat turns into an incident.
Threat intelligence, according to InfosecurityOutlook experts, is the collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of current and predictive security data that enables security teams, developers, and automated tools to make intelligent decisions about their infrastructure, data, and users’ security.
Threat intelligence is important because it gathers raw data on emerging or existing threat actors and threats from a range of sources. This data is then analyzed and filtered to create threat intelligence feeds and management reports that automated security control solutions can use.
Benefits of Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence aids in the prevention of cyber-attacks as well as the recovery of damages in the event of an incidence. Threat intelligence provides the following real benefits for improving your organization’s security posture.
Network Infrastructure Security
Once a threat actor has gained access to your network, they can crawl through it utilizing lateral movement and syphon out sensitive or financial information. You may secure your network’s infrastructure and prevent threat actors from progressing if they have already entered your environment by scanning for certain IoCs and blocking them in your environment.
Assessing Security Posture
Threat intelligence aids in the assessment of your infrastructure’s security posture. It provides details on how to exploit vulnerabilities detected in various software, tools, and apps. Threat intelligence allows you to keep track of new vulnerabilities that are found or exploited, as well as which important assets are in danger. In this manner, as soon as the suppliers correct any vulnerabilities or defects in them, you may apply timely patches or updates to your essential assets.
Use of Threat Intelligence in Compromise Assessment
Threat intelligence can also be used to assess your surroundings in order to determine if it has been compromised. If you suspect that some of your assets have been compromised, you can request a compromise assessment to ensure that your assets are recovered as quickly as possible. The evaluation will investigate the presence of a threat actor in your environment using global threat feeds.
Sharing of Threat Intelligence Data
Threat intelligence data sharing aids several organizations in hardening their defenses at the same time. If a known threat actor plans espionage, organizations with access to the campaign’s indicators of compromise can block the indicators and gain immunity to the attack ahead of time.
Data Loss Minimization
As Threat Intelligence aids in the blocking of known malicious domains and IPs associated with global threat actors, the blockage stops known threat actors from infiltrating your environment using the same malicious IPs and domains. As a result, such attackers will be unable to install information-stealing malware or ransomware in your environment, enhancing the protection of your data.
Users may reduce cyber hazards in advance by focusing on the most relevant cyber threats to your company. Your cyber security posture will stay reactive without threat intelligence, waiting for an incident, theft, or breach to work against you. Threat intelligence substitutes this reactive approach with a proactive one, allowing you to prevent cyber-attacks before they happen. Organizations can use threat intelligence to discover infrastructure flaws that could be used in future cyber-attacks and rectify those flaws to eliminate entry points for threat actors.
Conclusion
Therefore, threat intelligence allows you to see your security posture and warns you about prospective risks. Organizations can make targeted investments of resources and assets to boost cyber security in the appropriate direction with this improved understanding and proactivity. It not only helps to deflect incoming threats, but it also helps to reduce your environment’s weaknesses.
