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An Examination of the 5 Most Effective Threat Intelligence Use Cases

It’s integral to have a threat intelligence platform that protects your brand, employees, and clients from cyber threats. This complex threat prevention, recognition, and mitigation requires customization to meet specific needs. Use case approach is the most effective way to produce solid results. Via identification, clarification, and organization of system requirements, use cases examine potential system and user interactions to reach a specific goal. The most effective examples are:

Brand Observation

Concentrating only on the threats and vulnerabilities within a closed internet area could be a costly mistake. A robust threat intelligence platform should also monitor open sources with public exposure potential, with particular attention to the social media, as attacks from there will be harder to identify. This can be identification of fraudulent profiles, discovery of malicious content, and evaluation of losses.

Vulnerability Ranking

With infinite potential threats, it’s vital to develop a system of prioritization via data gathering and analysis. The standard cyber threat philosophy in everything is a priority. While being ideal, this approach is ambitious and untenable, resulting in the prioritization of “major” problems. Quite often, threats labeled as new and unexplored are in fact the exploitation of consistent and unimproved vulnerabilities.

The right threat intelligence platform will recognize that the improvement of persistent and known issues will reduce the number of new threats on which they are based.

Threat Recognition and Remediation

While a goal of 100 percent impenetrability is often impossible to meet, the speed at which an attack is recognized, investigated, and responded to can be improved. This requires the previously mentioned reprioritization of vulnerabilities, data enrichment via real-time access to files and objects for compromisation indicators, and referral to existing large datasets. A threat intelligence platform that can also proactively identify threats offers a premium level of security.

Multi-Source Monitoring

Open source data only accounts for 4 percent of the internet. That’s why closed source monitoring of the deep web and dark web, which account for 90 and 6 percent respectively, is vital to cyber threat prevention. Comprised of secure logins and paywalls, typically for reports, personal information, and private databases, the deep web is inaccessible by search engine crawlers. The dark web is more insidious, often home to illegal marketplaces and accessible only via encrypted browsers that ensure anonymity. Threat vulnerabilities and attacks are often shared and traded in these closed sources, which is why monitoring them is crucial to your company’s security. Due to the expertise and skill required to access these sources, it’s vital to utilize a threat intelligence platform able to navigate this space for you.

Complementary Technology Enhancement

The most basic, yet integral of effective use cases is the integration of threat intelligence with pre-existing security systems and processes. This will bolster up a variety of security technology areas, including intrusion detection and prevention, secure email gateways, firewalls, web application protection and more. Your threat intelligence platform will not merely coincide with your current systems, it will complement them seamlessly, yielding more effective results.

Threat intelligence platforms are transitioning from an enhanced addition to current security to a vital addition to comprehensive protection. When implementing one, it’s critical to identify the use cases that are pivotal to your company’s unique needs, rather than dubious efficacy with multipurpose solutions.