What is Threat Intelligence and How Can it Help You?

What is Threat intelligence? Its the process of collecting and analyzing raw data to obtain actionable insight into a cyber hacker’s intentions, motives, and attack behavior. Threat intelligence helps us make faster, more informed, and actionable decisions and change the behavior of cyber criminals from reactive to proactive, particularly in the fight against cybercrime.

Threat intelligence is done to understand an actor’s user patterns and tailor defense solutions. What’s more, in the world of cybersecurity, advanced persistent threats are always trying to outdo each other. So, understanding a hacker’s behavior helps you to tailor appropriate defenses and pre-empt potential future attacks.

Because of the growing risk of cyber-attacks, organizations are gradually recognizing the value of threat intelligence with 70% of organizations planning to increase their threat intelligence spending in upcoming quarters.

So, why is threat intelligence important, and how can it help you?

1. Shed Light on the Unknown

Cybercriminals work behind our backs and obtain critical user information – passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, files, and other data. Cybercriminals access our endpoints and infiltrate our networks without our knowledge.

Luckily, a well-implemented threat intelligence program can shed light on the unknown, enabling security teams to make better decisions. Threat intelligence gathers raw data about the different sources of threats and the actor’s intentions.

So, with threat intelligence, you can shed light on the unknown, especially relating to your network, endpoints, and computing infrastructure. You can easily sniff out potential hackers and identify their intentions and user patterns.

2. Proactive Future Threats

Threat intelligence collects, processes, analyses, and reports raw data to identify a hacker’s motives and user behavior. When well-implemented, threat intelligence can help you become more proactive against future threats.

Threat intelligence empowers cybersecurity actors or stakeholders with information about adversarial techniques, tactics, and methods.

3. Decision-making

Threat intelligence empowers executives, managers, and organizational personnel to make better investment decisions. Threat intelligence guides cybersecurity personnel on risk mitigation, helping cybersecurity actors to make informed and data-backed decisions.

4. Agility and Preparedness

Organizations are constantly looking for systems and structures that will give them a unique level of agility and preparedness in cybersecurity. Luckily, threat intelligence helps organizations of all sizes and shapes better understand their attacks, respond to attack incidents, and pre-empt future attacks.

And for most small and medium-sized enterprises, this data helps them achieve a certain level of security that would otherwise not be there. On the other hand, firms with large IT security teams can reduce their workforces and skills required to sniff out and prevent themselves from potential attacks.

So, the very prospect of collecting raw data, analyzing, and reporting may help you reduce your security team significantly by using external threat intel feeds and making analysis more effective.

5. Cost Effectiveness

A cyber-threat intelligence is cost-effective compared to running and maintaining expensive internal IT teams. The Ponemon Institute estimated that a data breach costs an organization an average of $8 million from fees, fines, and lawsuits.

A cyber-threat intelligence will save your organization from having to incur such costs as it will help you prevent and minimize the cost and impact of attacks.

6. Improves Efficiency of Security Teams

Threat intelligence collects and processes raw data, providing timely and actionable data to your security personnel. Timely provision of important security information helps the security personnel be adequately prepared for any attacks. The threat intelligence system will allow for increased efficiency, enabling your security team to focus on priority areas.

7. Lower Risks

A cyber-threat intelligence informs the business of any potential vulnerability in the computing infrastructure, thus preventing hackers from exploiting potential weaknesses if prompt action is taken. Through risk identification, the risk of data loss is eliminated and operations can run smoothly. Thus, lower risks lead to business process continuity, allowing organizations to operate smoothly and serve customers promptly.

8. Collaborative Knowledge

Threat intelligence allows different security stakeholders to obtain and share security information. With collaborative knowledge, security personnel can learn about different attacks that affect other companies and implement the appropriate safeguards. In addition, collaborative knowledge enables organizations and security personnel to share tips and tricks to prevent cyberattacks.

9. In-depth Cyber Threat Analysis

Threat intelligence obtains raw data on criminal behavior, attack sources, and behavioral patterns. This information becomes intelligence that can be utilized to establish appropriate security protocols, thus pre-empting your organization from future threats.

Bastionpoint is a trusted provider of security IT solutions. We provide an outsourced IT department that helps you manage different aspects of your IT – from cybersecurity to helpdesk support. Our superior solutions have enabled us to work with thousands of clients on simple and complex IT undertakings.

Contact Bastionpoint for timely and actionable threat intelligence solutions.