How To Turn Cyber Threat Intelligence into Action

Leveraging cyber threat intelligence is key to a strong security stance. That said, action must be taken with the data and insights gained through this intelligence. Without action, it is just data. However, the data must be presented in an actionable way to ensure it can be leveraged fully and utilized in the fight against cyber threats.??

Actionable intelligence is one key to getting the most out of your security stack. Without it, security teams spend more time analyzing data and less time acting upon it, making it difficult to effectively oust and combat threat actors. By transforming raw data into actionable intelligence, teams can prioritize threats, streamline workflows, and make informed decisions faster. This not only leads to improved operational efficiency but also enhances the organization’s ability to respond swiftly to incidents, minimizing potential damage.?

Actionable intelligence can aid in predictive analysis, allowing teams to anticipate future threats based on identified patterns and adapt their defense strategies proactively. In essence, transforming intelligence into action enables a proactive rather than reactive approach, ultimately fortifying the organization's cyber defenses against evolving threats.?

Key Components of Threat Intelligence?

There are two sets of key components that improve the efficacy of cyber threat intelligence: types of threat intelligence and sources. Let's dive into each:??

Key Types of Threat Intelligence?

• Strategic Threat Intelligence: Provides high-level overviews of the threat landscape to inform decision-makers. It is comprised of trends, emerging threats, attack motivations, and geopolitical factors.??

• Tactical Threat Intelligence: This type of threat intelligence focuses on techniques, tactics, and procedures used by adversaries (like the MITRE ATT&CK Framework). It leverages indicators of compromise (IoCs), malware analysis, phishing templates, and more.?

• Operational Threat Intelligence: Provides actionable insights into active campaigns or ongoing threats by utilizing details about current attacks targeting your industry or organization, attack vectors, or actors.?

• Technical Threat Intelligence: Technical data, such as vulnerabilities, exploits, and IoCs, are key to this type of threat intelligence. Content like malware hashes, malicious IPs, domain names, and command-and-control (C2) server details are paramount to its success.??

Primary Sources of Threat Intelligence?

• Internal Sources: Valuable threat intelligence lives right on your network in the form of security logs. Other internal sources include incident reports, which show historical attack data to empower pattern recognition and vulnerability assessments from internal audits to identify weaknesses.?

• Open Source Intelligence: Various blogs, forums, and other platforms allow security professionals to share information to strengthen the industry.??

• Commercial Threat Intelligence Feeds: Security providers often have their own threat intelligence feeds that can be connected to their products. NETSCOUT offers ATLAS Intelligence Feed (AIF) to enrich its DDoS protection and cybersecurity solutions with the latest adversary information.?

• Information Sharing Groups: Industry groups can also share information to help protect their networks. This type of threat intelligence source tailors the information to a specific industry, providing more pointed suggestions to strengthen security.?

• Government and Law Enforcement Agencies: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), FBI, and other government agencies often share alerts on emerging cyberthreats to help inform security teams of the latest adversarial tactics and patterns.??

Operationalizing Cyber Threat Intelligence?

The first step in operationalizing threat intelligence is to define the objectives and scope. This empowers security teams to understand the organization's needs and set goals around the scope of intelligence, creating a clear charter for what needs to be done to block the most relevant threats to your industry. After setting goals, teams must collect and aggregate data to analyze. This includes identifying data sources, automating data collection, and validating data quality to empower teams to have accurate, actionable data delivered to them quickly to stay ahead of adversaries.??

Processing and analyzing data is a key next step in operationalizing cyber threat intelligence. This is when raw data is enriched and analyzed by teams for prioritization and attribution to discover the most important threats to target. Once the data is processed and analyzed, it can be used to develop actionable insights, translating raw intelligence into actions. This generates specific recommendations, including blocking malicious IPs, updating firewall rules, or applying patches. It can also be used to create playbooks to standardize incident response workflows and help with tasks like cyber threat hunting.?

Measuring the effectiveness of procedural changes is another key aspect of operationalizing cyber threat intelligence. Looking at KPIs, such as detection rates, response times, and the number of prevented incidents, can help determine whether the updates affected the organization's security stance.?

Teams should never stop improving their security stance. Continuous improvement is key to keeping up with the ever-changing threat landscape. Investing in new threat intelligence tools and running periodic tests against real-world adversary techniques help keep security measures sharp and successful.??

Best Practices for Transforming Intelligence into Action?

Transforming threat intelligence into action requires aligning intelligence efforts with business goals to protect critical assets and address specific risks. Organizations should prioritize high-quality, relevant, and timely intelligence from trusted sources while filtering out noise to focus on actionable insights. Integrating intelligence feeds with security tools like SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and network detection and response (NDR) enables automation, reducing response times and improving efficiency. Developing clear playbooks for incident response and fostering collaboration between teams ensures that intelligence is effectively applied across the organization.??

Proactive threat hunting, supported by IoCs and TTPs, helps identify hidden adversarial activity, while participation in sharing communities like ISACs or ISAOs enhances collective defense. Continuous monitoring, regular updates, and contextualized reporting tailored to stakeholders ensure intelligence remains effective and relevant. Measuring success through key metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) allows organizations to refine processes and improve outcomes, creating a dynamic and responsive threat intelligence program.?