Network Security
Vulnerability Management
Privileged Access Management
Endpoint Security
Threat Hunting
Unified Endpoint Management
Email & Collaboration Security
Contents:
Huge volumes of data, a scarcity of analysts, and rapidly evolving cyber threats characterize today’s cybersecurity landscape’s challenges. There are many tools available to manage this data in current security infrastructures, but there aren’t many vendors that offer integration between them. This converts to a gargantuan engineering effort to manage systems, as well as a waste of already insufficient funds, resources, and time. Many businesses are opting to adopt a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) to counter these issues.
What Is a Threat Intelligence Platform ?
A Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) is a technology that enables companies to gather, aggregate, and manage threat intelligence data from a variety of sources and formats. It allows security teams to identify, investigate, and respond to risks rapidly and effectively by providing them with information on already known malware and other security threats.
What Is Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence is defined as “evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and actionable advice, about an existing or emerging menace or hazard to assets that can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject’s response to that menace or hazard.”
The most common cyber threats of today include phishing, malware, ransomware, DDoS, botnets, APTs. They can all gain access to or interfere with an information network’s normal planned operations, causing significant financial or reputational damage.
Why Do Companies Need Threat Intelligence Platforms
Today’s cybersecurity issues (huge volumes of data, a scarcity of analysts, and rapidly evolving cyber threats) suffocate security and threat intelligence teams with noise and false positives, making it frustratingly challenging for them to identify and classify the most relevant and useful data and, most importantly, which threats are real and which ones don’t need any further attention.
Under these conditions, threat intelligence platforms can automate data curation, regularization, enrichment, and risk scoring, as well as threat intelligence analysis and sharing.
Dashboards, rulers, alerts, and notes are just some of the ways threat intelligence platforms display all of the information related to possible data and enrichments, simplifying IT teams’ work, and thus providing a high return on investment and value for any company that implements them.
How Does a Threat Intelligence Platform Work?
The main pillars of threat intelligence platforms are data aggregation, data normalization and enrichment, integrations, analysis and response.
Data aggregation
This functionality is essential to TIPs and it refers to their ability to automatically gather and connect data from a variety of sources (open source, third party paid, government, trusted sharing communities, internal).
The data formats can also vary – STIX/TAXII, JSON and XML, email, CSV, TXT, PDF, Microsoft Word documents.
Data normalization and enrichment
The massive amount of data collected from various sources is automatically processed in three stages: normalization (combining data from multiple sources), de-duplication (removing duplicate information), and enrichment (removing false positives, indicators scoring, context addition).
Integrations
Threat intelligence platform vendors collaborate with SIEM and log management system vendors to pull down indicators for security solutions within the customer’s network infrastructure. SIEM, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and APIs can all be integrated with TIPs.
Analysis and Response
Threat intelligence platforms automate the research and collection processes, minimizing response time. The analysis phase of a Threat Intelligence Platform includes: support for the development of new indicators and research, processes for incident escalation and response, but also for analyst workflow. Moreover, intelligence products can be created and shared with stakeholders.
Benefits of Threat Intelligence Platforms
A threat intelligence platform’s main advantages are as follows:
- Automation and simplification of the full threat intelligence data collection, organization, and enrichment process.
- Real-time monitoring, detection, and response to security vulnerabilities.
- Detailed information on ongoing and potential security threats, as well as documentation regarding threat actors’ methods and strategies.
- The possibility of sharing threat intelligence data with other relevant parties via alerts, reports, and other means.
- Integration with other security systems like SIEM solutions, firewalls, APIs, IPSs, endpoints etc.
Who Can Use a TIP?
The threat intelligence platform architecture can help streamline the work of various teams:
- SOC (Security Operations Center) – by automating routine tasks like integrations, enrichment, and scoring.
- threat intelligence – by allowing them to access a data repository that consolidates and facilitates the process of making predictions according to associations and contextual data.
- management and executives – by providing a unified platform and a comprehensive reports overview, allowing them to effectively share and interpret information as incidents arise.
TIP in the Heimdal Security Suite
Heimdal’s Endpoint Detection and Response service provides many of the benefits that TIPs do. To secure a company’s entire ecosystem, all of its components work together and leverage the intelligence provided by the other modules. When threats arise, Heimdal’s EDR provides greater visibility into corporate endpoints and allows for faster response times.
If you request a demo now, you’ll be able to enjoy a 30-days free trial of unique prevention, hunting, remediation capabilities, as well as a quick response to sophisticated malware, both known and yet unknown.
- Granular telemetry across endpoints and networks.
- Equipped with built-in hunting and action capabilities.
- Pre-computed risk scores, indicators & detailed attack analysis.
- A single pane of glass for intelligence, hunting, and response.
Final Thoughts
To be effective, threat intelligence must be actionable; it must be accurate, contextual, and easy to understand for those making decisions.
Threat intelligence platforms increase productivity, enable better decisions, and help provide far more comprehensive detection and response to cyber threats by bringing all of the involved parties and data into a single enterprise security solution.
Drop a line below if you have any comments, questions or suggestions – we are all ears and can’t wait to hear your opinion!
P.S. Did you enjoy this article? Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram to keep up to date with everything we post!
Elena Georgescu is a cybersecurity specialist within Heimdal™ and her main interests are mobile security, social engineering, and artificial intelligence. In her free time, she studies Psychology and Marketing. Some of her guest posts on other websites include: cybersecurity-magazine.com, cybersecuritymagazine.com, techpatio.com
