Where cybercriminals are advancing their tactics to penetrate your network, tech-savvy professionals are devising ways to outsmart them. Threat Intelligence is one such mechanism that proactively identifies network vulnerabilities.
When you already know about the attacker’s next move, you can better defend your network and preempt future attacks.
That’s why businesses are increasingly relying on threat intelligence to secure their corporate assets. Let’s understand threat intelligence in detail, including its importance in network security.
What Is Threat Intelligence?
A mechanism where data is gathered, processed, and analyzed to evaluate threat actors’ targets, motives, and attack behaviors is termed threat intelligence.
This enables security professionals to make faster, more informed, and data-backed decisions, maximizing the security of network systems.
Threat intelligence is highly effective as it allows you to have a proactive approach for countermeasures against threat actors.
As the decisions are backed by strong evidence, there is less likelihood for cybercriminals to find security vulnerabilities in a system.
Threat Intelligence Use Cases
Threat intelligence offers unique use cases to every member of the security team.
| Role | Use Cases |
| Sec/IT Analyst | Integrate threat intelligence feeds with other security products. Block suspected IPs, domains, web addresses, and files. |
| Security Operations Center (SOC) | Leverage threat intelligence for alert enrichment. Tune newly adopted security controls. Link alerts with incidents. |
| Intel Analyst | Look closely for intrusion evidence. Review threat intelligence reports to detect the attacker. |
| Computer Security Incident Response Team CSIRT | Finds why, who, when, and how of an attack. Find the root cause of attacks to evaluate scope. |
| Executive Management | Create a security roadmap by assessing the threat level of the company. |
Threat intelligence takes a strategic, tactical, and operational approach to deliver data about existing and potential threats.
The data can be as simple as malicious domain names to as complex as the anatomy of potential cyberattacks.
Why Is Threat Intelligence Important for Network Security?
As hackers become more capable, the need to secure networks has become more important than ever. Cyber attackers can infiltrate your network, move laterally, and access your sensitive corporate data, putting your business at risk. Cyberattack costs are expected to reach $20 trillion by 2026.
Therefore, businesses should deploy threat intelligence that works based on evidence to mitigate or prevent an attack.
Threat intelligence collects data that gives insight to companies about a potential threat that can lead to a major cyber attack. This data is provided to companies via “threat feeds” that update threat detection.
Moreover, it identifies current security gaps in your network, which can make your security susceptible to attacks.
You can leverage this data to eliminate the loopholes from your system before cyber attackers exploit your network vulnerabilities. Some advantages of using cybersecurity threat intelligence for network security are:
Gathers Actionable Data
Threat intelligence not only delivers real-time alerts about a cyber security threat, but it also provides actionable data.
This intelligence gives an insight into cybersecurity indicators, for instance, email addresses, servers, and web domains that were used in cyberattacks.
These threat indicators are scanned, and actionable data is provided so that your security team can develop best practices to prevent the likelihood of an attack.
Ensures Access Control
Access Control is one of the many network security types measures. It helps ensure that entry points are secured. It involves tools and procedures to keep suspicious actors from entering the network.
Threat intelligence blocks malicious addresses and domains that belong to cyber attacks. Therefore, it stops cyber criminals from penetrating your infrastructure and hence, protects your critical assets.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is an effective network access control strategy that grants limited permission to privileged accounts to access a network.
PAM also leverages threat intelligence that continuously monitors privileged accounts. It immediately alerts companies if irregular or suspicious activity is undergone in such privileged accounts.
Evaluate Security Posture
Threat intelligence evaluates the security posture of your organization. Your system, application, and tools are continuously analyzed to detect potential vulnerabilities.
Moreover, it keeps you informed of the newly detected and exploited vulnerabilities, including which corporate assets are at risk.
As a result, you can ensure timely updates and patches to your valuable assets as soon as cybersecurity professionals fix vulnerabilities within your system. This way, you can secure your network and data before cyber criminals can approach them.
Provide Cyber Threat Analysis
Threat intelligence provides an in-depth analysis of cyber threats. It involves different methods that cybercriminals can use to exploit your particular network and ways you can deploy to prevent your network.
If your current cybersecurity strategy is not keeping your network secure, it means your system exhibits serious security gaps that should be detected by cyber threat intelligence. Possible vulnerabilities will be identified by threat intelligence, so subsequent mitigation actions should be carried out.
Maximize Staffing Efficiency
Besides directly securing your network infrastructure, threat intelligence makes your security professionals more productive and efficient. It eliminates alert fatigue, making them available for more important tasks.
Additionally, manual validation and correlation of threat intelligence are highly time-consuming and time-consuming, therefore, businesses can use those intelligence solutions that leverage automation and artificial intelligence.
This will reduce the security response time and eliminate the fake positives from the process, maximizing your resource utility.
How Do You Use Threat Intelligence For Network Security?
You will find plenty of service providers equipped with threat intelligence analysts. They will work closely with your security personnel or IT team to devise a plan for your small business.
After incorporating threat intelligence, potential threats will be detected along with best practices to keep these threats at bay. Such valuable information will help your security professionals to make necessary adjustments.
Besides providing your company with the necessary tools to stymie an attack. Threat intelligence will analyze if your network infrastructure is already having any security issues. By using the indicators of compromise, threat analysts will be able to discover any undetected malware.
For instance, spyware is a type of malware that criminals may install in your system without your knowledge and gather internet usage data and other sensitive information. Therefore, cyber threat intelligence will detect such hidden attacks and prevent them from causing further damage.
Final Words
Threat Intelligence is a highly sophisticated approach to counter existing and potential threat actors. It provides indicators, mechanisms, context, and implications that organizations can use to make well-informed decisions.
From threat feeding, real-time alerting, and actor profiling to threat monitoring and operational intelligence reporting, cyber threat intelligence will certainly empower your security team to find vulnerabilities and protect your valuable assets from getting into the wrong hands.
