May 2, 2023
Threat intelligence enables leaders to generate value through security processes and demonstrate that value to stakeholders.
The first part of this series emphasized the challenges that cybersecurity leaders face in uncertain economic environments. New threats emerge constantly, yet corporate stakeholders are often reluctant to invest in new security capabilities, especially if they involve onboarding additional in-house talent.
Once executives start looking at information security for signs of IT bloat, security leaders may find themselves under pressure to defend the value of their tech stack. This is challenging in any environment, but it can be particularly difficult when executives are looking to cut costs.
Security leaders need to respond with robust data that clearly attributes value to information security processes. Many security technologies don’t provide this kind of data in their default configuration, so it falls on the security team to define, collect, and analyze key performance metrics.
The problem is that threat actors rarely announce their intentions until it’s too late. Your analysts may save the company from catastrophic data breach costs every day, but quantifying the value of their work requires more insight into each threat detected, and every investigation launched in response.
Read More
Protect Your Security Budget Against Economic Risks with MDR: Part One
Quantify the Value of Effective Incident Response
Any organization that suffers a cyberattack should be prepared for disruption. However, a minor breach of non-critical, non-sensitive data is a very different scenario than a catastrophic headline-making supply chain attack.
Without robust threat intelligence capabilities, analysts cannot easily tell whether an alert leads toward the first scenario or the second. This information will only become apparent after the investigation is well underway – and significant employee hours have been dedicated to its resolution.
From the analyst’s perspective, a minor data breach and a catastrophic cyberattack may look like the same thing at first glance. It could be an unexpected connection to a server in a foreign territory or a collection of ICMP pings of unusual size.
These are not eye-catching critical vulnerabilities that scream for analysts’ attention. They are better described as “That’s odd” moments that many people might easily overlook.
The analyst who detects this behavior may decide to investigate and respond. After they block that suspicious connection, there is little reason to go back and manually query a public threat intelligence database to try and find out what it was. This is especially true if that analyst already has an enormous backlog of other “That’s odd” moments to investigate.
However, security leaders need to know whether that suspicious event was a multi-million-dollar loss in the making. Your ability to demonstrate that fact can reshape your relationship with the executive board and other company stakeholders.
Curated Threat Intelligence Enables Accurate Value Attribution
Threat intelligence allows analysts to pinpoint the types of attacks they’re responsible for detecting and responding to. This kind of information can have powerful implications for the organization’s overall security strategy:
- It gives security leaders strategic information about threat actors’ motivations and intended outcomes.
- It enhances attribution, allowing security leaders to expose specific threat actors behind attacks.
- It provides valuable guidance and support for engaging with specific threat actors when necessary.
- It gives security leaders an accurate way to report the cost savings associated with addressing specific cyber risks.
Public threat exchange data feeds are often included in SIEM technologies and workflows. However, these data feeds are not prioritized or categorized to any individual use case. To use them, analysts must perform a sequence of time-consuming manual queries – with no guarantee they’ll find the result they’re looking for.
Curated threat intelligence solutions filter out the broad majority of threats that don’t apply to your organization. There are countless threats that target IT infrastructure, tech stacks, and software versions that are not your own. Filtering these out of threat intelligence feeds makes analysts’ jobs simpler.
Gain Instant Insight with Threat Intelligence as a Service
Few security teams have the expertise and resources to address every single threat they face. Security leaders who include curated threat intelligence in their managed detection and response partnerships can fill a crucial gap in their value attribution strategy.
Managed solutions like Castra’s combine specialist talent, product knowledge, and sophisticated technology to offload resource-intensive threat intelligence processes to an experienced provider. Let Castra provide your analysts with curated intelligence specific to your organization’s industry and risk profile.
Schedule a demo to find out how curated threat intelligence can meet your unique needs and provide a data-based solution for attributing value to detection and response processes.