Cyber Threat Intelligence

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)?

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) refers to the collection, analysis, and dissemination actionable information about potential or existing cyber threats that target an organization's digital assets. It enables organizations to proactively defend against cyberattacks and minimize their impact. CTI provides insights into the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors, allowing organizations to make proactive, informed decisions about their security posture and resource allocation.

CTI is not limited to technical indicators, such as IP addresses or malware signatures; it also encompasses contextual information, such as the motivations, targets, and capabilities of threat actors. By understanding the threat landscape and the specific threats targeting their organization, organizations can prioritize their security efforts and focus on the most critical risks.

Types of Cyber Threat Intelligence

There are generally four types of cyber threat intelligence, each serving different needs:

1. Strategic Intelligence: High-level information intended for decision-makers, often involving assessments of risk, threat actor motivations, and the potential impact on business operations.

2. Tactical Intelligence: Technical details that are useful for security teams, such as indicators of compromise (IP addresses, domains, etc.), TTPs, and vulnerability analysis.

3. Operational Intelligence: Insights about specific, impending attacks that inform incident response activities. This includes data on when, where, and how an attack may occur.

4. Technical Intelligence: Detailed technical data about specific cyber threats, such as malware samples, command-and-control (C2) infrastructure, and the methods employed by attackers.

Three Main Elements of Cyber Threat Intelligence

The three main elements of CTI include:

1. Data Collection: This involves gathering threat data from diverse sources, including open-source information, proprietary feeds, threat sharing communities, and even data from internal logs.

2. Analysis: Once the data is collected, it needs to be processed, contextualized, and evaluated to determine its relevance, accuracy, and potential impact. This analysis transforms raw data into useful intelligence.

3. Dissemination: The intelligence must be communicated in a form that can be easily understood and acted upon by the intended audience. This can range from detailed technical reports for SOC teams to executive summaries for decision-makers.

How is Cyber Threat Intelligence Used?

Cyber Threat Intelligence is used by a wide range of stakeholders in an organization, from security analysts to executives. CTI is utilized to enhance detection and response capabilities, prioritize vulnerabilities, and proactively manage security risks. It empowers security operations centers (SOCs) with actionable insights to quickly identify threats, aids incident responders by providing context to ongoing incidents, and helps risk management teams understand emerging threats that could impact the organization.

Importance of Cyber Threat Intelligence

CTI is important because it bridges the gap between raw data and actionable knowledge. It enables organizations to stay ahead of adversaries by understanding emerging attack trends and identifying vulnerabilities before they are exploited. By anticipating and mitigating threats, CTI helps minimize the impact of cyber incidents and provides a strategic edge in managing the cybersecurity landscape. In today's dynamic threat environment, having access to reliable threat intelligence can be the difference between a successful defense and a costly breach.

CTI plays a pivotal role in safeguarding organizations for several reasons:

• Understanding the Threat Landscape: CTI provides a comprehensive understanding of the threat landscape, including the latest threats, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed by malicious actors. It equips organizations with the insights they need to prioritize risks and allocate resources effectively.
• Early Detection and Prevention: Timely access to CTI enables organizations to detect and respond to emerging threats before they escalate. By analyzing threat intelligence feeds and monitoring Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), organizations can identify potential attacks and take proactive measures to prevent them from causing significant damage.
• Informed Decision-Making: CTI supports informed decision-making by providing actionable intelligence and insights on threats that could impact an organization's specific industry, infrastructure, or region. This intelligence empowers leaders to make timely decisions and implement appropriate security measures.
• Strategic Planning: CTI contributes to strategic planning by providing organizations with a long-term perspective on the evolving threat landscape. By understanding the emerging threats and trends, organizations can develop proactive strategies to enhance their cybersecurity posture and mitigate potential risks.

Example of Cyber Threat Intelligence in Action

An example of CTI in action could be the detection of an emerging ransomware campaign targeting a particular industry. A threat intelligence provider may alert healthcare organizations about ransomware groups specifically targeting medical data, including details of TTPs, compromised infrastructure, and relevant IOCs. With this information, the organizations can proactively update their defenses, modify access controls, and conduct awareness training to reduce the risk of successful attacks.

Cyber Threat Intelligence for Third-party Networks

As more organizations migrate to the cloud and leverage high-performing external technology in place of in-house operations, the business world today is more interconnected than ever. Cyber risks in one organization inevitably threaten business partners, customers, and third-party vendors as well.

To protect their organizations, CISOs need automated cyber threat intelligence solutions that can monitor and measure risk across their entire digital perimeter – including all geographies, business units, cloud deployments, subsidiaries, and M&A networks.

This is where security ratings can offer tremendous value.

Where traditional vendor risk assessments that are used as sole sources of truth, like penetration tests and vendor questionnaires, offer only limited or point-in-time assessments, security ratings can provide a continual measure of the security performance of an organization and its third-party network. The cyber threat intelligence offered by security ratings can easily fit into current third party assessments strategy and lifecycle risk management programs to help immediately expose risk within supply chains, enabling organizations to focus resources and work with third parties to make strategic risk management decisions.

Mitigate cyber risk with Bitsight Security Ratings

Bitsight Security Ratings are a powerful tool for proactively reducing risk throughout the attack surface. Providing an outside-in view of any organization’s security posture, security ratings provide cyber threat intelligence that takes the guesswork out of evaluating security performance and vendor cybersecurity hygiene.

Bitsight Security Ratings range in value from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with higher ratings equating to better cybersecurity performance. To generate ratings, Bitsight gathers and evaluates terabytes of publicly available data on security behaviors from more than 120 sources around the globe. Ratings are based on objective, externally verifiable information about a company’s security performance in four areas: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and data breaches. By gathering this data daily and analyzing it for severity, frequency, duration, and confidence, Bitsight can produce accurate Security Ratings that are proven to correlate to risk of breach.

The cyber threat intelligence generated by Bitsight ratings lets you avoid blind spots across your digital perimeter, including third-party portfolios, subsidiaries, and M&A networks. With Bitsight, you can easily report on aggregate cyber risk to meet internal, regulatory, and compliance requirements, identifying vulnerabilities and infections, as well as the specific vendors who are susceptible to them. Security ratings provide insight into the underlying technology that third parties rely on, helping you constantly monitor endpoints to proactively mitigate cyber risk throughout your organization.

Three ways to use Bitsight Security Ratings

You can use Bitsight Security Ratings and the cyber threat intelligence they provide to proactively mitigate risk in three critical ways:

Benchmark security performance

Bitsight enables your organization to quantify cyber risk, measure the impact of mitigation efforts, and benchmark performance against industry peers. Through continuous controls monitoring, Bitsight ratings can help identify the sources and root causes of risk, and the actions that can help to mitigate it.

Third-party risk management

Bitsight Security Ratings enable your third-party risk teams to quickly and efficiently identify risk throughout the vendor lifecycle. Bitsight can help determine which vendors to assess first, which to assess in greater detail, and which vendors to terminate because of unacceptable risk levels. Security ratings can also provide cyber threat intelligence as part of the M&A due diligence process.

Increase cyber risk awareness

As executives and boards seek greater visibility into security risk, Bitsight tools for cyber risk quantification provide an easy way to assess risk in business terms and to facilitate productive conversations and decisions around cyber risk. Executive level dashboards can be used to educate management teams and provide context for decisions around funding for remediation efforts and business priorities.

Why customers choose Bitsight

Bitsight is the most widely adopted security ratings solution in the world, transforming how companies manage cyber risk. Founded in 2011, Bitsight has pioneered security ratings technology to improve the way companies monitor security controls, gather cyber threat intelligence, and manage risk in third-party relationships. Enterprises rely on Bitsight to help improve cyber resilience, while governments around the globe trust Bitsight to help enhance critical infrastructure cybersecurity.

Bitsight is the only security ratings provider with proven outside validation of its ratings, which have been demonstrated to correlate with data breach risk as well as business financial performance. By enabling more complete security visibility, Bitsight has earned the business of over 2400 customers, including 20% of Fortune 500 companies, 1200 government institutions, four of the top 5 investment banks, and all of the Big 4 accounting firms.