Should cyber defenses be more effective now that so much data is available?
Today, there is no shortage of threat data that can be used in the fight against cybercriminals. With so much of it to call on, the uninitiated might be tempted to wonder why security teams don’t build better cyber defenses to fend off attacks. But there is a gap between much of the threat data security analysts receive and the actionable threat intelligence they need to make informed decisions and responses.
The difference between data and intelligence
What is often loosely referred to as “threat intelligence” is actually a vast amount of information from a variety of sources, including threat reports, emails, vendor advisories, blogs, forums, articles, PDFs, and documents. A lot of it is text-based, which is a big problem because it doesn’t have a predefined format, making it much more challenging to process and operationalize. While this data is essential for comprehensive cybersecurity, analysis is made even more difficult because it also lacks context and relevance. Trying to get this kind of unstructured data into a usable, meaningful format consumes an analyst’s time, day in and day out. It is an arduous, lengthy, manual task.
Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data, security teams find themselves locked in an endless battle to sift through it all, eliminate false positives, and confidently identify true indicators of compromise (IOC). Not only is this approach time-consuming and inefficient, but its value is also reduced when errors occur.
To regain valuable time, analysts need a better and faster way to assimilate and structure data for further investigation. This is where automated threat intelligence processing can be most effective, eliminating the daunting task of processing data en masse.
VP International at Cyware.
Starting with raw data
The first phase is to bring the raw data, regardless of type, into a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) to restructure it into a standard format that analysts can easily query, and integrate with existing security tools. STIX is an increasingly popular framework that allows unstructured information to be consumed, as well as merged with internal logs and other structured data. It enables organizations to share threat intelligence in a consistent, machine-readable way. Multiple characteristics can be assigned to each threat: motivations, capabilities, and responses. Using the framework, a TIP automatically categorizes each piece of incoming threat information with the relevant attributes, eliminating hours of manual work and potential errors.
TIPs typically come with built-in agnostic conversion to a wide range of other formats. This also ensures that every piece of threat intelligence can be made available in the specific format required by each security tool and the technology that depends on it.
Creating actionable intelligence
Now that all threat data is standardized and on a central platform, the next phase is to rationalize the information by removing duplication and assessing the criticality of the different IoCs. In addition to internal threat feeds, TIPs typically rely on trusted third-party search engine services such as Shodan, VirusTotal, and WHOIS, to examine and enrich hash values, IP addresses, domain names, network artifacts, tools and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). ), and host artifacts used by attackers.
As part of the standardization process, duplicate and irrelevant threat indicators are removed. By automatically correlating large amounts of data, a TIP can reveal complex attacks or suspicious behavior that might have gone unnoticed if analysts examined individual data points in isolation. Instead, the data can be distilled to show which IOCs pose the greatest potential risk and given a confidence score to aid assessment.
This is where security teams come into their own. They assess the IOC’s reliability score and based on their evaluation, the TIP can be set up to assess various response actions, such as blocking the IOC on internally deployed security tools and adding them to the SIEM watchlist. With actionable information at their fingertips, analysts can apply their skills and knowledge to make more informed and faster decisions. No longer dependent on the threat processing treadmill, they can conduct advanced threat investigations to prioritize response and remediation, measurably improving their organization’s overall security posture.
Getting off the data processing treadmill
The threat intelligence lifecycle is a continuous process that involves multiple phases to achieve actionable intelligence, from collection, normalization, correlation, enrichment, analysis to dissemination. However, meaningful threat intelligence with relevant context is a world away from the raw, noisy data that tired security analysts often have to deal with. The overwhelming volume and complexity of data generated by various security tools and sources can take a toll on even the most skilled professionals.
Organizations are increasingly realizing the need to free their security analysts from the burden of manually processing threat data. A threat intelligence platform provides an automated way to provide clear, context-rich information that can be acted upon with confidence. These modern solutions allow security teams to focus their energy and expertise on proactive threat detection and rapid response, which is imperative to protect an organization from cyber attacks and build stronger defenses for the future help build.
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