What Does a Threat Intelligence Team Do?

Companies in the modern era simply cannot afford to rest on their laurels in the face of ever-increasing cyber dangers. The absence of a major cyber incident does not guarantee the perfection or continued efficacy of an organization’s cyber security safeguards and processes.

Vanson Bourne’s The State of SMB Cyber security in 2021 poll, commissioned by ConnectWise, found that 79% of business leaders are worried about a cyber assault on their company occurring within the next six months. To what extent can businesses reduce their anxiety about the effects of a cyberattack by taking preventative measures?

It’s time to bring in the cyber threat intelligence team (or cyber security research team, depending on your preference). Teams dedicated to threat intelligence constantly monitor the security landscape for new threats, analyze malware data, coordinate with sector counterparts, and disseminate findings. This helps businesses understand the current threat landscape and identify weak spots in their cyber threat intelligence team structure.

What is Threat Intelligence?

We define “cyber threat intelligence” as compiled information about potential dangers from new and old cyber actors. Threats are discovered through various means, including monitoring ransomware leak sites, malicious botnets, and open-source intelligence tools. Automating certain research aspects is crucial to maximizing the effectiveness of a threat intelligence team.

Why Cyber Security and HR teams Must Work Together in a Hybrid Work World?

The CRU team has automated systems that analyze security problems and alert humans for investigation or action. With automation, they download, analyze, and publish the results of hundreds of malware samples daily in our free threat feed. We regularly update the CRU threat feed with years of gathered information, assisting in identifying security risks and eliminating false positives.

Threat intelligence teams are aware of the significance of using technological, behavioral, and environmental aspects to determine the who, what, why, and how of any danger. Our feed’s contextual data generates packet captures (PCAPs) released to the industry, providing insights to analysts and researchers.

Security analysts derive intelligence from various threat information and security sources, correlating and analyzing them to uncover trends, patterns, and relationships. The intelligence gained is organization-centric, focusing on unique vulnerabilities, assaults, and assets within the organization. It offers detailed and contextual information, including potential threat actors, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and indicators of compromise (IoCs). This intelligence is actionable, assisting information security teams in assessing vulnerabilities, prioritizing threats, and evaluating cybersecurity solutions.

Costing victims an average of $4.35 million, detection and escalation expenses make up the bulk of this figure (at $1.44 million) in IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2022 report. By providing security teams with actionable threat intelligence, organizations may reduce the time it takes to detect attacks and the expenses associated with doing so.

DevOps, a trendy new term, combines the concepts of program design (Dev) and computer system administration (Ops). SecDevOps is an extension of DevOps that incorporates security into the development process by melding it with operations. SecDevOps is a methodology for managing the stacks of services involved in security detection. Increased automation and the utilization of quality control testing are two of SecDevOps’ advantages when it comes to security effectiveness and quality.

Analysts of Data

Data scientists collect, analyze, process, and model large, mixed-format datasets to inform action plans. In security, they build intrusion identification frameworks and automate specific security analyst services. Understanding key aspects of security breaches is essential for creating effective models, as “garbage in, garbage out” holds true.

Expert Security Architects

The security architecture of an MDR is crucial. It’s the future of the customer’s security data-gathering process. A security architect’s job is to anticipate hacker behaviors by thinking like one. To meet customer security needs and future-proof data architecture, additional skills are required beyond typical system architects.

Once again, the aforementioned positions form the backbone of an ideal MDR team, and Alert Logic has assembled just such a group.

Conclusion

Threat intelligence and cybersecurity research teams help businesses tackle online cyber threats effectively.

SMBs are vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to limited defenses and budgets. Data from “The State of SMB Cybersecurity in 2021” shows that only 23% of business leaders trust their company or IT partner’s ability to defend against an assault.

When it comes to controlled detection and response, threat intelligence is essential. The threat intel team provides crucial insights and information for spotting attack trends and assessing the impact of new threats. However, threat intelligence does not limit itself to a single job description. Delivering actionable threat intelligence and adding value to the overall solution requires a collaborative effort from dedicated specialists.