Threat Intelligence

Threat Intelligence Definition

Threat intelligence refers to information that organizations can use to combat cyber threats. This information starts off as vast sets of unorganized data that cybersecurity professionals and data scientists explore, visualize, and analyze, aided by ML platforms and libraries, in order to transform this data into actionable insights that power informed decisions.

Threat Intelligence flow chart showing the necessary steps to mitigate threats.
Image from Xorlogics

FAQs

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence data provides organizations with the most relevant and timely insights needed to understand, predict, detect, and respond to cybersecurity threats. Threat intelligence solutions collect, filter, and analyze high volumes of raw data related to existing or emergencing sources of threat to cybersecurity, the result of which are threat intelligence feeds and management reports. Data scientists and security teams use these feeds and reports in combination with automated security control solutions to develop an intelligence program with targeted incident responses to targeted attacks. 

Everyone from fraud prevention to security operations to risk analysis benefits from cyber security threat intelligence. Threat intelligence software provides interactive, real-time visualizations of data related to threats and vulnerabilities, which help analysts and security experts easily and quickly identify and understand patterns of threat actors. Understanding the source and target of attacks helps business leaders put effective defenses in place to mitigate risks and protect against activities that could negatively impact an organization.

Cyber threat intelligence can be categorized as strategic, tactical, or operational. Strategic intelligence concerns the overall capabilities and intent of cyber attacks, and the development of informed strategies associated with combating long-term threats; tactical intelligence concerns the tactics, techniques, and procedures that attackers may use in everyday operations; and operational intelligence, which provides highly technical information on a forensic level regarding a specific attack campaign.

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber threat intelligence refers to any information that can be used to develop proactive defenses against attacks carried out via computers, information technology, or virtual reality technology. 

The cyber threat intelligence cycle is carried out on an automated threat intelligence platform and consists of:

              Planning: Data requirements must first be defined.

              Collection: Large quantities of raw data is collected from internal and external threat intelligence.               sources. 

              Processing: Raw data is filtered, categorized, and organized.   

              Analysis: This process transforms raw data into threat intelligence streams with the use of real-time               structured analytical techniques, and helps analysts spot indicators of compromise (IOCs)

              Dissemination: Analysis results are then immediately shared with cybersecurity professionals and threat.               intelligence analysts. 

              Feedback: If all questions are answered, the cycle concludes. If new requirements are introduced, the               cycle begins again at the planning phase.

What is Global Threat Intelligence?

Global threat intelligence refers to information regarding the threat landscape throughout all nation states. Threat intelligence on a global scale requires an extensive network of cloud-based protection infrastructures, sensors, and experts that are constantly collecting data, identifying threats, providing contextual metrics, integrating customizable security products, providing actionable insights, and facilitating accurate, timely protective measures. NTT Ltd publishes an annual Global Threat Intelligence report highlighting the previous year’s most notable threats, incidents, and trends.

What are Threat Intelligence Tools?

The growing prominence of malware and cyber threats has resulted in an abundance of threat intelligence tools that provide valuable threat insights for protecting businesses.

These tools come in the form of both open source and proprietary threat intelligence platforms, which provide a host of cyber threat defense capabilities, such as automated risk analysis, private data collection, rapid threat intelligence research tools, reporting and multi-user threat intelligence sharing, curated alerts, vulnerability risk analysis, dark web monitoring, automated risk mitigation, threat hunting, brand intelligence monitoring, real-time security intelligence visualizations, accelerated investigation, firewalls and DNS security, threat libraries, API integration, customizable incident responders, global threat intelligence context, email phish identification and blocking, automated indicator extraction and multi-source data enrichment, scalable and contextual results, and more.

Why Threat Intelligence is Important?

The cyber landscape is increasingly plagued by persistent and insidious threats and a significant shortage of cyber threat intelligence analysts capable of coping with the growing variety of threat actors. Cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism target entire countries, specifically attacking critical infrastructures such as energy, finance, telecommunications, transportation, water, hospitals, and control systems. Attacks may be as small scale as identity theft of an individual, and as large scale as disruption of a foreign country’s election. 

Threat intelligence is proactive and actionable, and provides everyone from CEOs to Chief Information Security Officers to policy makers with the tools necessary to understand the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors, and to predict and prevent security breaches before they happen. 

Does HEAVY.AI Offer a Threat Intelligence Solution?

With the HEAVY.AI platform, cybersecurity professionals are able to access the entirety of massive threat intelligence datasets, facilitating quick and easy exploration, visualization, and analysis. HEAVY.AI Immerse provides real-time, interactive visualizations of the end-to-end ML pipeline, with cross-filtering, library integration, feature engineering, and model selection capabilities to help improve understanding of the overall threat landscape and accelerate security operations at unprecedented speeds.