When and Where Is Threat Intelligence Used?

Phishing.org.uk
5 min readJun 14, 2021

Companies and individual users can use threat intelligence for many different purposes, in many different areas. Therefore, threat intelligence tools are an important cybersecurity resource for users. So what are these areas of use? When and where is threat intelligence used?

When and Where Is Threat Intelligence Used?

Threat intelligence:

1. Accelerates Incident Response.

Incident response is one of the most stressful parts of cybersecurity defense. Employees in this leg of defense are among the most stressed in the cybersecurity industry. The biggest reason for this is the increase in cyber incidents in recent years. In the past two decades, the number of phishing software and similar incidents has increased steadily. That’s why experts receive thousands of alerts every day. Since the incoming alerts are quite different from each other, it is up to the experts to group these events manually and put them in order of importance. This causes the experts to spend unnecessary time.

But don’t worry! Threat intelligence can help reduce this burden on experts. With intelligence tools, you can automatically identify false positives and exclude them from analysis. You can put specific risk scores and explanations about these points and facilitate the experts’ work. You can compare information from different sources. In this way, you can quickly identify threats and give your analysts more time to respond to incidents.

2. Facilitates security operations.

As everyone knows, employees of the security operations center are trying to deal with too many warnings during the day. The most time consuming processes are sorting, prioritizing and analyzing alerts. However, because the warnings are too many, employees get tired after a while and do not examine some of the warnings. So they’re starting to take the warnings less seriously.

You can easily fix these problems using threat intelligence. Threat intelligence collects data faster and more accurately, can quickly understand false alarms, and prioritize risks. In addition, it identifies situations that are likely to be harmless, do not concern the company, and are currently protected by means of protection. Automating these steps speeds up event analysis.

3. Allows you to fix security vulnerabilities more effectively.

Prioritizing vulnerabilities according to the potential risks you face is very important in cybersecurity defense. According to research, hackers still target minor vulnerabilities, although most attacks are on the rise. In addition, hackers are taking action faster and faster. When they spot a vulnerability, they attack within fifteen days.

Accordingly, you need to deal with the vulnerability or take measures within two weeks before the attack occurs. If you can’t take action that fast, you should have a plan B. This plan B should include what you can do to minimize the damage if the attack occurs. If the hackers do not attack for two or three weeks, they are unlikely to target this vulnerability in the future.

With threat intelligence, you can identify vulnerabilities that could be really risky for your company, so you can focus on real threats.

4. Helps make effective risk reporting.

Companies analyze threats by modeling risks in many subjects. But employees do not put enough effort into most of these models. Modeling is done in haste, backed by sparse information, and not rationally based on the assumptions found in the reports. It becomes impossible to make a cybersecurity plan by reading these reports.

With threat intelligence, you can use certain risk criteria in your modeling and make your report more understandable. Intelligence reports contain information about which methods are used in attacks and which threat actors use this method. Thanks to these reports, you can learn about the types of attacks targeting your industry, how often these attacks occur, and where the trend is moving. In addition, threat intelligence also compiles information on which security vulnerabilities hackers took advantage of in attacks and the damage caused by past attacks. Finally, it examines whether these vulnerabilities exist in your company.

5. Detects attacks Takıng advantage of your brand.

Preventing your brand from being used in attacks is as important as detecting and responding to vulnerabilities in your systems. Threat intelligence collects data on hacker groups, thus helping you understand the attackers’ motivations and the methods they use. In particular, there are technical feeds and indicators in intelligence. Intelligence tools associate these with the data you have and report them to you. Threat intelligence prevents payment fraud, the use of your company data, and cybercriminals impersonating your brand. In this way, you will prevent data breaches, possible fines or legal cases. In addition, you will avoid losing consumer trust.

6. Allows you to use the resources you have effectively.

The most important duty of chief security officers and managers is to use limited resources effectively while protecting the company from risks. For this, cybersecurity officers should evaluate the risks and threats that may affect the company well, determine the strategies and technologies to reduce them, notify the senior management of the decisions and explain the necessary investments.

Threat intelligence analyzes general trends in the industry, the threat environment, and identifies where you need to invest. It measures risk and enables your security workers to work better and more effectively.

7. Minimizes damage caused by service providers.

Most of the companies are digitizing their businesses and in the process, they have to take advantage of various service providers such as cloud services. In their daily work, they store a lot of data in these cloud services. This not only makes things easier for many industries but also makes companies vulnerable to attack. While protecting ourselves, we also need to analyze the risks faced by the service providers we cooperate with. But most companies do not spend enough time minimizing third-party risk. They focus on this problem only after taking all other measures. They ignore that many of their attacks in recent years originated from third parties.

Threat intelligence can also help you reduce third-party risk. Thanks to the intelligence data, you can identify potential risks related to the services you use, and take quick action with real-time alerts.

When and Where Is Threat Intelligence Used?: Best Threat Intelligence Tools

You can ensure your cybersecurity only by considering all these. The easiest way to do this is to use Threat Intelligence tools. Check out our Threat Intelligence tool by visiting our site now and start protecting your company effectively in no time!

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