As a business owner, you’ve probably invested in security tools like SIEMs, antivirus software, and IPS/IDS systems.
You also likely have a dedicated cybersecurity team. Possibly it’s even divided into departments like a SOC team for system monitoring and a DFIR team for incident response.
But here’s the question: Are your teams equipped to go beyond simply reacting to cybersecurity incidents? If your company underutilizes threat intelligence, chances are they’re not.
Understanding the role of Cyber Threat Intelligence
Cyber threat intelligence involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data on potential or current cybersecurity threats. Threat Intelligence is a rather broad term that includes various security processes and specialized tools across an organization:
Types of threat intelligence tools
| Category | Primary Use Cases | Primary Consumers |
|---|---|---|
| Threat Intelligence Feeds | Expand threat coverage of your security systems like SIEMs, firewalls, and IPS/IDS with the latest IOCs. |
1. SOC Team
2 Incident Response Team |
| Threat Intelligence Lookup | Provide linked, contextual data around indicators, allowing to query databases for known IOCs such as malicious IPs, URLs, or file hashes. |
1. SOC Team 2. Threat Analysts |
| Sandboxing Solutions | Analyze suspicious files or URLs in isolated environments to understand their behavior and impact. |
1. SOC Team
2. Threat Analysts |
| Aggregation Platforms | Enable to combine multiple threat feeds for analysis and correlation, enhancing decision-making during an incident. |
1. SOC Team 2. Threat Intelligence Analysts |
| Threat Sharing Platforms | Facilitate the sharing of structured threat information within a community or organization. |
1. Threat Intelligence Team 2. SOC Team |
Keep in mind that internal organizational structures differ among companies. Your team names and responsibilities may vary, but the table above should give you a solid understanding of who typically uses which threat intelligence tools and for what purpose.
Read more about cyber threat intelligence definition.
What happens in teams that don’t have threat intelligence
Without threat intelligence tools, your teams are essentially flying blind. Consider a situation where a suspicious artifact shows up in your system logs, like an unfamiliar IP address. How does the SOC team immediately identify what this IP means and how to address it effectively?
In short, without threat intelligence, they can’t.
Manual research will be needed instead, requiring the team to pull data from various open-source sources to understand the threat. This process takes time, and time is something you can’t afford to lose during an active attack.
One of the primary goals of threat intelligence is to provide context for artifacts and indicators. Linking an IOC to a specific threat and then to TTPs helps the team understand the exact steps needed to counter the threat.
Threat Intelligence Benefits for a Business
But the benefits don’t stop there. Here are 5 more reasons why threat intelligence is crucial for a strong security posture:
1. Reducing the risk of successful cyberattack
Reducing attack risk is a key advantage of threat intelligence. Your SOC team can use real-time threat feeds to get ahead of new threats and deepen their knowledge of TTPs and IOCs.
The data helps in proactively adjusting firewall rules, IDS/IPS signatures, and other security measures, making your defenses stronger. At the same time, the incident response team gains valuable context about attacks, speeding up containment and removal.
2. Preventing Financial Loss
According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million. Finding and containing a breach usually takes months, making prevention a top priority.
Threat intelligence helps your SOC team spot phishing campaigns, fraud attempts, and data exfiltration risks. This protects both financial assets and customer data. By doing this, you avoid expensive breaches, regulatory fines, and the erosion of customer trust that financial setbacks bring.
3. Improving security operations and detection accuracy
Alert fatigue happens when too many alerts overwhelm security specialists, causing them to miss genuine threats. This is often due to frequent false positives and lack of prioritization.
Threat intelligence allows SOC analysts to sort alerts by relevance and risk. They can zero in on high-fidelity alerts that truly matter, cutting down on the noise from low-level threats. This focus lets the team fine-tune IDS/IPS signatures and craft better correlation rules for SIEM systems. The result is a more efficient SOC, with fewer false positives and faster threat identification.
4. More accurate vulnerability management
Your vulnerability management team can use threat intelligence to smartly prioritize patches. Instead of wasting time on low-risk vulnerabilities, they can focus on those actively targeted or with known exploits.
Threat intelligence also guides the creation and updating of secure configuration baselines. This data-driven strategy ensures you’re actually shrinking your attack surface, not just ticking boxes.
5. Improves risk analysis
Your risk management team can enhance their risk assessments by incorporating threat intelligence. This gives them a real-time, nuanced view of threats, beyond just historical data or industry benchmarks. They can factor in current events like emerging APTs or zero-days to better gauge risk impact and attack likelihood.
This alignment with the current threat landscape improves decision-making for resource allocation, policy setting, and incident response planning.
Wrapping up
As you can see, threat intelligence offers multiple business benefits. To sum up, it:
- Lowers the chance of successful attacks
- Helps prevent or cut down financial losses
- Boosts the efficiency and accuracy of security operations
- Enables precise vulnerability management
- Enhances risk analysis
Interested in expanding your threat coverage?
Right now, you can integrate ANY.RUN’s Threat Feeds to receive the latest IOCs directly from ANY.RUN’s sandbox. They are pre-processed and filtered for false positives.
You can also utilize Threat Intelligence Lookup to speed up your investigations by contextualizing your alerts or artifacts with more information on the malware family and its TTPs, extra IOCs, samples, etc. from our large repository of threat data.
Contact our sales team for pricing and demo of the product.
We’re planning more products to help you make the most of ANY.RUN’s continuously updated threat data for improved security awareness and detection. Stay for exciting updates!
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