As highlighted in a previous article on this channel, Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) serves as the lifeblood of a Security Operations Center (SOC). However, the SOC is far from the only entity within an organization actively leveraging CTI data; they are the primary consumers, given their critical need to continuously monitor, detect, and respond to emerging threats. But who else within the organization relies on CTI data, and for what purposes?
Beyond the SOC, numerous teams and departments can benefit from integrating CTI data into their operations. For example, Risk Management teams utilize CTI to understand and quantify the potential risks posed by new and evolving cyber threats. By incorporating CTI insights, they can assess threats’ likelihood and potential impact on business assets and tailor risk mitigation strategies accordingly. This alignment between threat intelligence and risk management allows organizations to prioritize high-risk areas and optimize resource allocation, directly supporting broader security policies.
Incident Response teams are also significant consumers of CTI data. For them, threat intelligence is essential in investigating and containing security incidents. By understanding the tactics, techniques, and procedures associated with known threat actors, Incident Response teams can more quickly and accurately identify the root cause of an incident, mitigate immediate damage, and prevent recurrence. Threat intelligence informs playbooks, enabling the Incident Response team to adapt their responses based on the characteristics of specific threat groups.
Additionally, Vulnerability Management teams leverage CTI to prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world threat activity. CTI enables these teams to move beyond simple CVSS scores, focusing instead on the vulnerabilities that adversaries are actively exploiting. Using CTI to contextualize vulnerabilities, the organization can address the most pressing threats, improving the overall security posture.
CTI is also valuable for Executive Leadership and Decision-Makers. High-level summaries of threat intelligence can provide insights into the current cyber threat landscape, allowing executives to make informed decisions about investments in security tools, staffing, and training. By understanding the evolving nature of cyber threats, leadership can make strategic choices that align with the organization’s risk appetite and long-term goals.
What are some of the critical challenges with CTI?
Despite CTI’s immense value, organizations face several critical challenges in effectively utilizing it across various departments. These challenges can hamper the ability of SOCs, Incident Response teams, and other stakeholders to make the most of CTI data, impacting the organization’s overall security posture.
Challenge 1: Know your threat actors.
The foundational step in launching a CTI program is developing a clear understanding of which threat actors are active and, more importantly, identifying those that pose the most immediate risk to your organization. Effective CTI requires an awareness of the current threat landscape and an ability to anticipate shifts in threat actor behavior as adversaries frequently adapt their tactics and target profiles. This involves gathering detailed intelligence on threat actor motivations, capabilities, and historical patterns, which can inform a focused monitoring strategy that aligns with the organization’s unique security needs.
A common mistake for new CTI programs is attempting to indiscriminately monitor all known threat actors. While it’s true that any threat actor could change focus and target a new industry or sector, trying to track every group can dilute your efforts and lead to information overload. Instead, a more strategic approach involves prioritizing threat actors based on their relevance to your organization’s assets, industry, and threat profile. This targeted monitoring helps ensure that resources are focused on the threats most likely to impact the organization.
To begin with, organizations should conduct a risk assessment to identify the types of data, assets, and systems most critical to operations. This assessment provides a foundation for identifying which threat actors would be most interested in these assets—whether financially motivated cybercriminals, hacktivists, or nation-state actors focused on espionage. Understanding which adversary profiles align with your asset profile allows for a more focused CTI strategy.
- Assess Threat Actor Relevance: The first step is evaluating the relevance of various threat actors based on historical data, industry trends, and intelligence from external sources. For instance, if your organization operates in the healthcare sector, focus on threat actors known for targeting medical data, ransomware groups targeting patient information, or nation-states interested in medical research. Prioritizing actors with a history in your industry enables a proactive defense.
- Monitor Adversary Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures: Threat actors often have distinctive Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), offering valuable clues about their likely targets and methods. Regularly updating and assessing TTP profiles helps organizations stay aware of changes in adversary behavior, enabling them to adjust defenses and monitor priorities accordingly.
- Stay Informed on Industry Threat Landscape Changes: Threat actors often shift focus based on geopolitical, economic, or industry changes. For example, an uptick in ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure could indicate that groups targeting finance or manufacturing sectors are broadening their focus. Keeping an eye on broader trends helps an organization anticipate potential shifts in threat actor profiles, even if these actors have yet to target the organization directly.
- Adapt to Evolving Adversary Behavior: Threat actors are highly adaptive and often shift their focus based on new opportunities or defenses. For example, as organizations improve their defenses against phishing, adversaries may pivot toward social engineering attacks that exploit other entry points. For this reason, organizations should periodically revisit and revise their list of high-priority threat actors, adjusting monitoring focus to keep pace with changes in adversary behavior.
Challenge 2: Know your cyber defense program
Once you have identified and thoroughly understood your primary and secondary threat actors, their behaviors, motivations, and modus operandi, you can build or refine your cybersecurity defense program. This understanding allows you to tailor your defensive strategies, ensuring that security controls are precisely aligned to counter the threats most likely to target your organization. This targeted approach optimizes the effectiveness of your defenses and enables clear communication with leadership on the rationale behind security investments and strategies.
With insights into threat actor profiles, the next step is to systematically design a defense program that outlines which security controls are required, where they should be deployed within the corporate network, and why they are necessary. This threat-informed approach transforms a generic security program into a focused, risk-based strategy that directly addresses the most significant threats.
- Mapping Threat Actors to Security Controls: By identifying the TTPs the most relevant threat actors use, you can determine which security controls will most effectively detect and mitigate these tactics. For instance, if a known threat actor relies heavily on credential theft to infiltrate networks, implementing strong authentication controls (such as MFA) and privileged access management becomes a priority. Similarly, if ransomware groups targeting your industry have a track record of exploiting endpoint vulnerabilities, robust endpoint detection and response solutions and a rigorous patch management process are essential.
- Defining Control Capabilities and Coverage: Each security control must be regularly evaluated for its capability and effectiveness against specific threats. This step involves defining what each control is intended to achieve, how it can detect or prevent the identified threats, and ensuring that it is deployed in the right location within the network to maximize its impact. This analysis enables you to allocate resources wisely, placing higher levels of protection in areas most susceptible to attack.
- Implementing a Layered Defense Strategy: With an understanding of threat actor tactics, you can implement a layered or “defense-in-depth” strategy, where multiple security controls reinforce each other. This approach is critical because it reduces the likelihood of a successful breach if one layer is bypassed. For example, email security controls, such as phishing detection and user awareness training, may work with endpoint protection to address common attack vectors like spear-phishing emails used by threat actors.
- Quantifying and Communicating Risk to Leadership: This targeted defense design approach enables the security team to communicate effectively with management by providing concrete answers to critical questions. A frequent question from (senior) management they often ask is, “Do we have the right cybersecurity protection in place against our threat actors?” The CTI program allows you to answer this question confidently by demonstrating that defenses are explicitly designed around known and emerging threats.
With a straightforward, threat-aligned program, you can quantify risks and articulate the rationale behind each control’s placement, purpose, and priority. This also facilitates a dialogue with management about resource allocation, emphasizing where additional investment may be necessary and where controls are effectively mitigating risk.
Challenge 3: Know your budget constraints.
By thoroughly analyzing historical data from your CTI platform and the security data lake, you gain valuable insights into the activity patterns and behaviors of threat actors targeting your organization. This dual-source analysis enables you to identify which threat actors have been the most persistent and where they are likely to target next, adding a predictive layer to your defense strategy.
Combining CTI data and the organization’s security data lake allows for a multi-dimensional view of past incidents, revealing which threat actors have been active and their specific methods, timelines, and focus areas. This integrated analysis provides answers to critical questions such as:
- Which threat actors have historically targeted our industry or organization?
- What techniques and tactics have they employed in past attacks?
- Where have they successfully breached defenses, and what assets were targeted?
Understanding where to allocate cybersecurity budgets can be challenging for senior management, especially when resources are constrained. Security leaders can justify expenditures with clear, evidence-backed reasoning by presenting insights based on historical threat activity and predictive analysis.
Summary
In summary, for an effective CTI program, it is crucial to regularly assess and address the evolving needs of the various stakeholders and users of the program. You can ensure the intelligence generated will stay relevant and actionable by aligning CTI initiatives with different teams’ specific requirements and objectives—such as Security Operations, Incident Response, Risk Management, and Executive Leadership. This approach not only maximizes the value of the CTI program but also provides a clear and measurable demonstration of its impact on the organization’s overall cyber resilience.
Leave a Reply