3 Tips for Improving your Cybersecurity Intelligence

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cybersecurity intelligence
Written by Rachel Holmes

Cybersecurity intelligence is a powerful weapon against risk. It enables you to discover, proactively respond, and mitigate emerging threats—internally and across your supply chain.

But how can you improve your cybersecurity intelligence without overburdening busy teams? 

Here are three ways you can combine technology, processes, and people to effectively acquire, analyze, and disseminate intelligence to improve your organization’s security posture.

1. Proactively identify threats early—no matter how large your attack surface

As your organization digitally transforms and grows, so does your attack surface. Just think of the enormity of your digital footprint. It likely includes the following:

  • On-premises systems and infrastructure
  • Cloud instances (including shadow IT)
  • Remote offices and users
  • Subsidiaries and business units scattered across geographies
  • A growing supply chain of digital vendors with access to your systems and data

Understanding what you’re up against in terms of risk exposure and emerging threats isn’t easy. You could take an inventory of each digital asset, but understanding its security posture and the severity of any potential risks can be a mammoth task.

Cybersecurity intelligence can help. For instance, technologies such as external attack surface management let you see what an attacker sees down to the individual assets in your ecosystem.

You can also drill down further to gain intel on areas that matter most to you, such as critical geographies or cloud instances—and the severity of any vulnerabilities. With this insight, you can quickly and proactively focus resources where they will have the most impact on your security posture. Additionally, you can identify the root cause of issues to prevent repeating the same mistakes.

2. Continuously monitor for potential threats—internally and across your supply chain

Threat detection is an ongoing task, but cybersecurity intelligence can make the process much easier.

For example, instead of relying on periodic penetration tests or security audits, which only provide a snapshot of risk across your digital ecosystem and your vendor portfolio, consider investing in automated continuous monitoring.

Continuous monitoring provides vital intelligence so you can keep a pulse on your cyber health across your digital supply chain—including third and fourth parties.

Rather than monitoring individual systems or assets in a silo, continuous monitoring uses powerful data and analytics to discover hidden and evolving risk across your entire digital ecosystem. You'll receive alerts as soon as a risk is detected, such as an unpatched system or a change in a vendor’s security rating.

In addition, use your data to find specific security gaps that correlate with a greater chance of ransomware attacks or data breaches, so you can invest resources more strategically.

3. Share cybersecurity intelligence with stakeholders

As you build your cybersecurity intelligence capabilities, it’s important to share these findings with other stakeholders in the business, such as board members. According to Gartner, after economic uncertainty, cyber risk ranks as the number two concern for boards.

Reporting to the board is an integral part of cybersecurity leadership and must be approached strategically. Instead of presenting information about risk in technical terms, focus on metrics that will help non-technical audiences understand the risks your organization faces.

Try to incorporate business risk into your reporting by comparing the security posture of your organization with those of your peers, as well as explaining the financial impact of cyber risk on your business.

You can take this a step further by sharing resources and intelligence with your vendors and suppliers. Consider the following:

  • Ensure your critical vendors have access to the security data you collect so they can understand their own risk of a breach and take proactive measures to reduce it.
  • Collaborate to understand and mitigate the impact of major security events, such as zero day attacks. These attacks are difficult for most organizations to respond to effectively, but with the right cybersecurity intelligence, you can identify which vendors are vulnerable, prioritize and automate vendor outreach, and monitor responses to determine whether additional action is necessary.

Cybersecurity intelligence from Bitsight can help you know what you’re up against

Bitsight is pioneering the use of cybersecurity intelligence to help organizations transform how they manage exposure, performance, and risk for themselves and their third parties.

Discover how Bitsight can help you continue your digital transformation and growth without worrying about expanding your attack surface. Then explore our customer success stories, such as how the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium—the national authority for cybersecurity in Belgium—uses cybersecurity intelligence from Bitsight to measure the country’s security posture, discover vulnerabilities and threats, share findings for rapid remediation, and benchmark performance against other EU countries.