What is the life cycle of threat intelligence?
Threat intelligence refers to recognizing and acting upon information about cyber threats. The process involves identifying a threat, collecting data about it and processing this data to obtain a better understanding. Not only does it enhance prevention against data loss, but it also involves tracking the trends and patterns used by hackers to create a safer environment for the future.
Life cycle
With ever-evolving technology, threats to cybersecurity keep becoming anew over time. Therefore, threat intelligence has a persistent cycle that keeps updating and providing feedback for more advanced security.
Strategizing
Organizations establish their cybersecurity objectives and goals while identifying threats that pose security risks. This process involves a comprehensive assessment to pinpoint critical assets most susceptible to these threats, such as customer data or financial systems. Additionally, organizations categorize these threats, considering their nature and potential impact. Not all threats are equally frightening for a company’s assets and warrant an equal response, therefore this step also includes categorizing threats and prioritizing them based on their precedence. This strategic approach ensures that organizations tailor their threat intelligence efforts to their unique security needs, focusing on the most pertinent and high-priority threats to their assets and operations.
Data collection
This step encapsulates gathering data from different organization sources, which encompasses internal and external channels such as system logs, network traffic, threat actor intelligence, social media, open-source platforms, and even the dark web. Both the quality and quantity of data are essential for the success of threat response by the organization. Establishing partnerships with other organizations, conducting extensive research, and leveraging automation tools play pivotal roles in ensuring data collection accuracy, completeness, and integrity.
Data processing
Once sufficient quality data is obtained, it’s subjected to processing. This step involves converting the raw data into a more usable format and filtering out the unnecessary bits of information. Not only does it help remove duplicates, but it also sorts the information based on relevance and importance. The last part of this step is communicating this data in a more presentable way to facilitate analysis. Furthermore, this step involves formatting and presenting the data comprehensibly and organized, which is pivotal for facilitating subsequent in-depth analysis.
Analysis
Following the meticulous data processing phase, the subsequent step involves a comprehensive analysis. This analysis is focused on several key objectives: identifying patterns within the data, assessing the credibility of the information, and recognizing the prevalent techniques employed by potential threats. This step also aids in understanding the impact of potential threats and enables the organization to create an informed plan for response.
Response feedback
Having subjected the collected information to processing, enrichment, and analysis, the threat intelligence focuses on detailing the suggestions to improve the organization’s security. Armed with these insights, the organization can formulate an informed and strategic response plan, enhancing its ability to proactively safeguard against emerging security risks.
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