What Is a Threat Intelligence Platform?
There are numerous cybersecurity threats that firms deal with. To address the constantly evolving threat landscape, security operations and protection increasingly require a proactive strategy.
It is necessary to learn about future attacks by cybercriminals and other bad actors before they occur and to stop the attack before it begins. Clear intelligence indicates a planned or impending attack on an institution. A threat intelligence platform’s job is to gather threat insights.
What Is a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP)?
Identifying, gathering, aggregating, organizing, and analyzing threat intelligence from the clear web, deep web, and dark web in multiple formats is the function of a threat intelligence platform (TIP). To find signs of compromise, it analyzes the data collected using cutting-edge algorithms and machine learning (IOCs).
Advanced TIP systems also use human intelligence gleaned from cybersecurity experts who interact with threat actors that plot attacks and trade stolen and leaked data.
Cybersecurity teams can uncover new risks from malware attack types, as well as plans for upcoming assaults, using the information disclosed and surfaced by a TIP, and use this to undertake proactive risk management and remediation.
How Does a Threat Intelligence Platform Work?
It is challenging to recognize and communicate cybersecurity dangers in a complicated global system. Understanding the various phases of developing successful threat intelligence is crucial for appreciating the value of technologies that automate and streamline this process.
- Phase 1: Collection
Raw data for threat intelligence is gathered from various sources, such as internal and external logs, open-source intelligence (OSINT), and proprietary data from first or third parties, and then processed in a central platform.
IP addresses, domains, file hashes, and vulnerability information are all critical threat data (such as the identifiable information of users, raw code from paste sites, and text from news sources or social media platforms). This data is a compilation of general information, business data, and technical and non-technical documentation.
- Phase 2: Processing
Processing makes the raw data more accessible for analysis. Sorting, categorizing using metadata tags, and screening out extraneous data or false positives and false negatives are all included in processing.
To ensure that information and analysis can be made available promptly, the capacity to process data fast and accurately is crucial. Large businesses generate a lot of data daily due to the various risks they face. The speed and efficiency of the data processing stage are essential for timely analysis.
- Phase 3: Analysis
Any company can benefit from threat intelligence’s numerous uses, including the creation of robust software by development teams, the setting up of application firewalls by network and system administrators, and the removal of harmful hosts by platform abuse response teams. The analysis stage must produce a variety of analyses to satisfy the needs of each audience.
High-performance pattern recognition, triage, and predictive analysis are needed for evaluating threat data. So, their analysis uses machine learning.
- Phase 4: Dissemination
Threat intelligence can only be effective if it is shared and used. Finding the appropriate users for threat intelligence is the first step. Next, ascertain the updates’ latency or frequency. You might not have access to real-time data, so you’ll need to consider how to account for a delay in your security operations based on the threat intelligence service you select. After that, think about the best format for each platform or audience.
Why Do Companies Need a Threat Intelligence Platform?
Threat intelligence can improve your security infrastructure and have a beneficial effect on your business goals. It offers improved visibility into both ongoing threats and new breaches across the threat environment. By doing this, you can lessen the chance of data loss, avoid or decrease interruptions to business activities, and contribute to the prevention of potential attacks.
Moreover, threat intelligence enables them to take prompt, well-informed actions to avoid system outages, prevent the theft of private information, safeguard their intellectual property, and maintain the goodwill and clientele of your business.
Threat intelligence must be manually verified and correlated, which takes time and resources. The security crew is more effective and less likely to suffer from alert fatigue, thanks to automated threat intelligence systems.
Factors to Consider While Choosing the Right TIP Solution for Your Business
1. Threat Intelligence Lifecycle Automation
Routine tasks, including threat intelligence ingestion, enrichment, analysis, sharing, and actioning, should be automated by a contemporary threat intelligence platform. The threat intelligence platform should leverage cognitive technologies like machine learning (ML) to automatically weed out the clutter and generate great intelligence that needs the security teams to take action.
2. Intelligence Collection and Standardization From Multiple Sources
The finest threat intelligence platform gathers threat data from numerous sources, supports various file types, and standardizes all threat data into a single language. Threat intelligence solutions are now able to collect structured and unstructured threat data in a variety of formats, including STIX 1.x/2.0, XML, JSON, MAEC, MISP, CSV, YARA, PDF, Email, OpenIOC, and CybOX.
3. Internal Threat Data Utilization to Jam Bad Actors
A platform for threat intelligence that can additionally gather and enhance data collected from internal sources like firewalls, SIEM, antivirus software, EDR/NDR tools, etc., is considered adequate. Your threat intelligence platform should produce context-rich, actionable intelligence that is more pertinent to your company.
4. STIX Support
Your chosen threat intelligence platform should support newer STIX releases when they become available. STIX enables companies to communicate threat intelligence in an automated, machine-readable version, expanding the potential for sharing threat intelligence, balancing proactive detection with reaction, and encouraging a systematic approach to threat intelligence.
5. Enhance. Correlate. Evaluate
Security teams can augment and correspond indicators of compromise (IOCs) from various intelligence sources and remove false alarms with the help of the best-of-breed threat intelligence system, which automates every stage of the threat intelligence lifecycle. This allows security teams to add perspective to thread records by correlating and enriching IOCs. Additionally, you can prioritize threat intelligence action by calculating the IOCs’ confidence scores. You can analyze threat intelligence and block IOCs according to the risk score.
6. Threat Intelligence Sharing for Collaboration
Bidirectionally exchanging threat knowledge between internal teams and external companies promotes security collaboration, aids in situational awareness, and allows organizations to learn from one another. For that, the control center of your threat intelligence platform communicates intelligence in both directions with each linked member or entity.
7. Centralized Visibility
It would be best if you had a comprehensive understanding of your overall security thanks to your threat intelligence platform. It should allow you to control your threat intelligence through centralized visibility and tracking, closing any security vulnerabilities.
8. Integration With Other Security Tools
Every company has a legacy system of some kind. Some threat intelligence platforms require significant adjustment and upkeep to ingest historical feeds, while others have interface options to consume data from other technologies. Choose the latter. Select a threat intelligence platform that can connect with other technologies in your company’s toolkit for threat detection and response, such as firewalls, EDR, SIEM, IDS/IPS, and SOAR.
9. Pre-Loaded Intelligence Feeds and Enrichment Sources
For security analysts, gathering threat intelligence from feeds offered by several vendors can be a strenuous effort that eventually causes vendor burnout. It would be wiser to choose threat intelligence solutions with enrichment sources and threat intelligence channels so that your security team can launch their threat intel activities without having to deal with various providers.
10. Data Storage Capability for Longer Periods
A threat intelligence platform is anticipated to gather enormous amounts of high-quality data for operationalization as a centralized intelligence location. The security teams need larger storage units to store this information after analysis because numerous sources, such as CERTs, social media, commercial TI providers, etc., continue to share enormous amounts of information. A threat intelligence platform should permit data storage for a prolonged time in addition to ample data storage because historical analysis helps put the objectives of a threat actor in a meaningful perspective.
11. Flexible Deployment Options
Flexible deployment choices are only one of the best threat intelligence platform’s numerous features. The threat intelligence platform on-premise implementation allows for better control for users with particular needs, consistent data access, and more straightforward interoperability with customers’ existing on-premise toolsets.
Consider cloud-deployed threat intelligence solutions, which are less expensive, more quickly implemented, and more straightforward to update to the most recent versions. A hybrid deployment offers an alternative for security teams whose security infrastructure is dispersed across cloud and on-premise settings. A sophisticated decoupled security orchestration is required to create cross-environment orchestrations blending threat intelligence platforms with other security technologies.
How Is NewEvol Different From Other Threat Intelligence Platforms?
NewEvol threat intelligence platform gathers information from public and private sectors worldwide and transforms it into real-time, actionable insights. With proactive threat indicators on active directories, IP addresses, hacking attempts, and other spam assaults, our threat-hunting and end-to-end cyber security intelligence are built on AI and advanced automation.
Analyses of cyber threat intelligence reduce the time required for incident response, enhancing your fundamental threat intelligence management. Furthermore, it gives you a 360-degree view of all current threat activity.
