What is Threat Intelligence? Tools, Meaning and Sources

In today’s digital world, understanding and mitigating cyber threats is essential for businesses. As sophisticated attacks like zero-day exploits and advanced malware become more common, threat intelligence emerges as a vital resource. This proactive approach equips organizations with insights into the latest risks impacting mobile devices, networks, and infrastructure.

Threat intelligence technology reveals who is behind attacks, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), and offers actionable strategies to prevent and remediate breaches. With the global cyber threat intelligence market projected to reach $15.8 billion by 2026, businesses are increasingly recognizing the importance of investing in these capabilities. This exploration of threat intelligence will cover its meaning, key tools, and diverse sources, emphasizing its crucial role in modern cybersecurity. 

What Kinds Of Threat Intelligence Are There? 

Threat intelligence comes in many forms, ranging from broad, non-technical information to detailed, highly technical information about attacks. Threat intelligence comes in several forms, such as:

• Strategic: Strategic threat intelligence is high-level knowledge that puts the threat in its proper place. A company could give this kind of non-technical knowledge to its board of directors. Besides, a risk study of how a business choice might leave the company open to cyberattacks is an example of strategic threat intelligence.
• Operational: Operational threat data is anything an IT department can use to stop a specific attack as part of active threat management. It includes details about the type of attack when it happened, and the reason for the attack. 
• Tactical: Tactical threat intelligence tells you how threats are carried out and guarded against. It includes the attack routes, tools, and platforms that attackers use, the companies or technologies being attacked and how to avoid them. A business can also use it to determine how likely different threats will happen against them. Besides, cybersecurity professionals use practical data to make intelligent choices about protection and security controls. 
• Technical: Technical threat information is specific proof that an attack is happening or signs that someone has gotten into your system. However, some threat intelligence tools use artificial intelligence to look for these signs. These signs could be email content from scam campaigns, IP addresses of C2 systems, or malware.

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The Importance of Threat Intelligence

Threat intelligence tools get fresh information from many sources about new and current threats and the people who pose them. Analysts create intelligence files and reports that automatic security solutions can use from the data. This is why it’s important:

• Obtaining the knowledge the organization needs to defend itself from threats and assaults.
• Organizing a way to deal with vast internal and external danger data from many unrelated players and systems.
• Keep up with the latest dangers from bad players, including zero-day flaws, advanced persistent threats, and different weaknesses and attack methods. 
• Data leaks and the costs they cause in terms of money, image, and compliance should be kept to a minimum. 
• Cybersecurity teams and researchers can stay ahead of threats by not having to deal with vast amounts of raw data that have yet to be handled or sorted.
• Getting the information you need to determine which security tools will work. 
• Tell leaders, users, and other important people in the company about the newest threats and what they could mean for the business. 

Threat Intelligence Is Beneficial To Whom? 

Threat intelligence is essential for any company whose network is linked to the Internet, almost all businesses today. Even though firewalls and other security systems are helpful, they don’t replace an organization’s need to keep up with threats that could harm its computer systems. Cyberattacks today are very different, complicated, and scalable, so threat intelligence is essential. Besides, many IT and security experts use threat intelligence data.

• Chiefs of computer security. They can get up-to-date and correct information that they can use to make choices and talk to other top managers about security problems. 
• Responders to incidents. IT incident response teams and other incident workers who work in SOC teams need threat intelligence to know how to stop an attack.
• SOC teams. Threat intelligence helps people who deal with cyber threats find strikes and plan how to defend against them. 
• Top executives in a company. C-level executives need access to threat intelligence data to understand security problems and events and explain them to stakeholders, authorities, and the public.
• Security experts. Analysts are responsible for giving accurate and helpful advice on how to deal with a specific threat. They also need data about danger from different sources and systems. 

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Key Characteristics of Successful Threat Intelligence Tools

There are different kinds of threat intelligence tools. However, to stand out from others, they need to give security teams helpful information that helps them deal with known threats correctly. Besides, here are some of the most important things to look for to help you choose the best threat intelligence tool for your business.

• Get Data In Real-Time

Collecting data in real time is the most essential part of any threat intelligence tool. This keeps systems up to date with the latest information about threats and how they work. These tools collect data in real time, reducing the chances for attackers to find and exploit flaws before detection.

• Easily Connect To Existing Security Systems

It’s easy for enemies to get through even the most giant castle because it has weak spots. You can strengthen those weak spots by combining threat intelligence tools with your security system. Adding threat data to security operations helps improve other security tools, like device security, firewalls, SIEMs, etc. Combining them into a single unit makes it hard for even the best enemies to find weak spots to use.

• Use Features Of Automation And Artificial Intelligence

Using threat intelligence tools with automated security and AI features together is like using lightning to deal with cyber dangers. However, automating the discovery and response processes can reduce the mean time to react to cyberattacks to minutes. If security events are compared to threat intelligence feeds, the tool can keep working and send a warning whenever a known threat is found.

Conclusion

To keep businesses safe from danger, cybersecurity experts are always looking for information about the next possible attack. Researchers look for threats and fix them, while hackers find new ways to circumvent defences. Besides, by getting cyber threat intelligence, people can learn a lot about how their enemies work and their strategies against them.

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