Cyber Threat Intelligence: Defending Against Cyberattacks

A cyberattack isn’t a question of if—it’s when. Every business, regardless of size or industry, can be a target. Hackers don’t discriminate, and even a single vulnerability can lead to devastating consequences, like data breaches, financial loss, and operational paralysis.

For small teams juggling daily responsibilities, keeping up with the evolving threat landscape can feel overwhelming. How do you stay ahead of attackers, gather the right intelligence, and act on it before it’s too late?

What Is Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)?

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) describes information that cybersecurity experts gather about threats that can be used to improve organizational operations and improve proactive security measures.

What Are the Three Main Types of CTI?

There are three main types of CTI: strategic, tactical, and operational intelligence.

Strategic intelligence looks at the threat landscape with a wide-angle lens, understanding which industries are being targeted most frequently, common malicious actors, and the types of motivations that are driving current threats.

Tactical intelligence moves from the “why” to the “what,” understanding the tactics employed by malicious actors to carry out certain threats, such as ransomware, phishing, social engineering, and zero-day vulnerabilities.

Operational intelligence offers additional details on current or potential threats impacting an organization, such as alerts around malware infections or emails indicative of phishing campaigns.

Why Do Businesses Need Threat Intelligence for Cybersecurity?

You may think your current security tools are enough to protect against threats, but cybercriminals constantly evolve their tactics, often outpacing traditional defenses. Instead of relying solely on reactive measures, businesses need threat intelligence to anticipate risks and stay ahead of emerging attacks.

By incorporating strategic intelligence, organizations can make more informed security decisions, collaborate with industry experts, and improve incident response times, gaining the upper hand in an ever-changing threat landscape.

Key Components of Cyber Threat Intelligence

A few components work together to make up cyber threat intelligence that can lead to actionable insights, including data collection, analysis, and information sharing.

Data Collection

Gathering information from several different sources will make your threat intelligence more impactful. This can include data from:

• Open-source intelligence (OSINT): Publicly available information from forums, news articles, social media, and blogs.
• Human intelligence (HUMINT): Information shared and collected from human experts, including informants and key industry contacts.
• Technical data: Internal data such as vulnerability scans, security logs, and network traffic information.
• Vulnerability databases: Reviews of publicly available databases to understand known vulnerabilities.
• Commercial threat feeds: Curated and analyzed data from threat intelligence services.
• Dark web monitoring: Analyzing the dark web to find organizational mentions or indications of planned attacks or stolen data.

Analysis and Interpretation

For raw data to be useful, it needs to be cleaned, normalized, and correlated through data processing. Then, cybersecurity experts can use threat modeling to find potential vulnerabilities and threats. Analysis and interpretation may also include trying to attribute the cyberattacks to specific actors and analyzing the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) that attackers are using. Contextualization and prioritization are also important, understanding how relevant the threat is and whether it’s a top priority to address it.

Information Sharing

Cybersecurity experts share information with one another to improve threat intelligence in the overall community. Information sharing can include internal sharing with key members in the organization, but also extends to external sharing with industry groups, partners, and information sharing and analysis centers. It can be hard to remember everything, so storing information in a threat intelligence platform (TIP) that can also be used for sharing is a useful exercise. To make it easier to share information, be sure to use standardized formats, such as TAXII and STIX.

Actionable Outcomes

After information has been found, processed, and shared, the end goal is to drive actions that improve security. This can look like engaging in preventative measures, such as patching vulnerabilities or implementing new security tools. Actionable outcomes from threat intelligence should improve your incident response times, allow you to make more strategically driven decisions, and assist you in prioritizing which vulnerabilities and threats to address first.

Understanding the Cyber Threat Intelligence Lifecycle

The cyber threat intelligence lifecycle consists of seven steps organizations experience when identifying, applying, and disseminating intelligence.

1. Threat Intelligence Planning: In the planning stage, analysts try to understand what kind of intelligence they need to gather based on the risk profile of the business and other circumstances that are unique to the business.

2. Threat Data Collection: Collecting threat data can come from both internal and external sources, such as network logs, security tools, intelligence sharing groups, and public databases.

3. Threat Data Processing: Once the scope of threat data has been decided and analysts have collected data, they move to the processing phase, where they aggregate, organize, and normalize the information for further analysis.

4. Threat Data Analysis: Analysts will examine the processed data with other contextual information in mind to predict the likelihood of certain security threats, attributing them to known threat actors if available. This analysis may come with suggested actions or strategies to prevent cyber threats or decrease risk.

5. Threat Data Integration: The findings from threat data analysis then are integrated with the current security infrastructure and current processes and policies with the goal of removing vulnerabilities, decreasing risks, and neutralizing threats.

6. Threat Intelligence Distribution: Depending on what threat intelligence is gathered, analysts will share information with customers, internal team members, and the wider cybersecurity community.

7. Customer and Community Feedback: Once information is shared, analysts may receive feedback from internal and external sources, which they can use to assess the impact of the intelligence they’ve gathered and improve processes in the future.

Tools and Technologies in Cyber Threat Intelligence

While strong cyber threat intelligence requires human expertise, tools and technologies can also be used to streamline your efforts and improve response times.

Threat Intelligence Platforms

Threat intelligence platforms (TIP) can be used to aggregate data from various sources, process it, and further analyze and share it with others. Most steps of the cyber threat intelligence lifecycle can be satisfied with these tools.

Threat Feeds and Data Sources

For updated threat information, cybersecurity experts should subscribe to threat feeds and other data sources. This can include free, open-source feeds, subscription-based commercial feeds, and industry-specific feeds. Cybersecurity teams can also collect information from vulnerability databases, dark web monitoring tools, and malware information sharing platforms (MISP).

Machine Learning and AI in Threat Detection

Machine learning and AI have been used in threat intelligence to quickly identify anomalous activity and patterns in large datasets, as well as improve the accuracy of identifying threats in real-time, reducing the likelihood of false positives. Machine learning algorithms can use historical data and trends to predict future threats, as well as analyze behavior to determine what might be perceived as out-of-the-norm, improving threat detection and response efforts.

Automation and Orchestration

Automation via AI and other tools can also improve the data collection and analysis process, automatically gathering and processing threat data, creating automated analysis tasks, and even making incident response more automatic. Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms specialize in automating threat intelligence workflows, including steps for incident response teams.

Challenges in Cyber Threat Intelligence

Sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing. Bringing in information for cyber threat intelligence can mean your organization is more informed and prepared for incoming threats, but there can also be challenges along the way that impede progress.

• Data Overload: Information overload and getting through the noise of threat intelligence to pinpoint the relevant information around threats can be a real problem. Automated tools can lighten the load.
• False Positives: If you’ve got overly sensitive systems, or they haven’t been trained sufficiently on expected behaviors, your team may start to get too many false positives, which can lead to “alert fatigue” and prevent security teams from seeing and responding to genuine threats.
• Information Sharing Barriers: Even though information sharing, internally and externally, comes with significant benefits for entire industries, there may be issues with trust, regulatory standards, non-standardized formats, and other technical challenges that prevent organizations from sharing information with one another.
• Resource Constraints: You may have gathered that the information collection, analysis, and dissemination process can be resource-intensive, and that can certainly be true. It requires money, time, and adequate staffing to subscribe to the right feeds, analyze data effectively, and process and disseminate information in a timely manner.

Best Practices for Effective Cyber Threat Intelligence

So, what do you do when faced with these challenges? Maximize your cyber intelligence efforts by applying the following best practices:

• Establish clear objectives. What are you trying to achieve with your threat intelligence program? What level of improvement would you like to see? Try to put numbers to your goals, such as a percentage decrease in mean time to detect threats, improved uptime, or number of true positives identified.
• Ensure the quality of organizational data. High-quality data matters when you’re working on threat intelligence measures. Ensure that your internal data, including security logs, is complete, reliable, and accurate. Be mindful of data formatting and the tools you may need to improve processing.
• Integrate and regularly collaborate with security operations. Intelligence analysts on your team will likely be separate from your operations workers. Do what you can to keep the lines of communication open. Plan regular stand-up meetings and share intelligence insights on unified platforms.
• Continuously train and upskill personnel. Your threat intelligence and security operations team members should be continuously developing their skills through ongoing training and other upskilling activities so that they can collect, analyze, and use threat intelligence in wise ways within your organization. 

Prevent Cyber Attacks and Protect Your Company’s Data

Proactive security measures, such as robust threat intelligence strategies, can best protect your company’s data in a cyber threat landscape that is constantly growing and changing.

If staying abreast of all potential threats feels like a heavy burden to handle on your own, the good news is that you can partner with cybersecurity experts—with native threat intelligence derived from more than 40 data centers nationwide—to focus your efforts and get to meaningful action more quickly.

TierPoint’s proactive security measures include multilayered approaches to environment safeguarding and business continuity solutions that are compliant with your regulatory requirements.