Businesses face numerous cyber threats and they need to use all the security measures at their disposal to stay protected. However, some security incidents can catch them off guard, especially if they are zero-day attacks. To avoid being blindsided, cybersecurity professionals use threat intelligence to learn about new threats.

Threat intelligence provides details on the specific attacks that organizations are exposed to, like how they affect an IT system, how they can be detected, and the mitigation measures to use against them, but this does not work as easily as it seems.

Cybersecurity professionals gather threat intelligence from many sources including online forums, other companies, government agencies, social media, internal security logs, and news articles. The threat intelligence data might be disjointed when collected, making it hard for security analysts to get actionable insights from it. Businesses use threat intelligence platforms to eliminate this problem because it helps them manage and analyze the collected intelligence in a process called threat intelligence management.

Threat intelligence management is a process that converts a large volume of threat data into actionable insights that cybersecurity professionals can use to enhance the security posture of an organization. The threat intelligence management process takes the following steps:

1. Data collection

During this step, a company’s cybersecurity personnel will source for threat intelligence from the sources mentioned above and collect all the data they believe to be relevant.

2. Intelligence processing

All of the collected threat data has to be cleaned to remove noise and ensure that what is left is usable, and this takes place during this step. The usable data will also be converted into a format that is easy to read.

3. Data enrichment and correlation

During this step, data analysts will add context to the processed data to give it more context. This helps them identify the patterns and connections that exist between different threats. The identified patterns and connections allow cybersecurity professionals to learn the motives that inspire cybercriminals and the strategies they use for their attacks.

4. Integration into existing systems

Cybersecurity professionals will use the insights obtained from the threat intelligence to improve their existing security systems and processes. In some cases, they will install new hardware components of software programs to detect the new threats and prevent them from causing harm.

5. Intelligence sharing

The fight against cybercriminals is a collective one, so cybersecurity personnel will share their knowledge of tackling the new threats with important stakeholders in their organization. They may also share that knowledge with their partner companies or other firms in their industry.

6. Evaluation

After implementing new strategies and processes to take care of potential threats. Security analysts will monitor the organization’s cybersecurity posture and make improvements where necessary.

Endnote

Threat intelligence helps companies prepare for zero-day threats so they can proactively protect their IT systems from harm. There are many places to source this intelligence from, but the collected data has to be cleaned before cybersecurity professionals can extract relevant information from them. The threat intelligence management process ensures that raw data is converted into actionable insights that can be used to enhance business cybersecurity.