What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber threat intelligence involves collecting and interpreting real-world threat activity and information about malware and cyber attacks that could lead to data, and money loss. 

Information security and cyber defense experts need to stay up to date on the latest threat intelligence to effectively safeguard business reputation and resources. In addition to external sources, they study data from internal systems, online accounts, and security programs to create a solid security intelligence framework. 

Cyber Threat Intelligence Definition

Cybersecurity threat intelligence is defined as the process of analyzing validated data from multiple sources to help organizations preemptively defend and respond against cyberattacks. 

The security threat intelligence program reveals attacker intent, targets, and methods of attacks. It offers a proactive solution to better ward off security breaches including, malware, phishing, IoT Vulnerabilities, Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks, and other advanced persistent security breaches.

What are the Types of Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence?

There are four primary types of threat intelligence:

• Strategic Threat Intelligence: Strategic digital threat intelligence analyzes and monitors the digital footprints of your company’s staff. It uses open-source threat intelligence techniques and provides real-time insights that can help accelerate remediation. 

• Tactical Threat Intelligence: It refers to evidence-based knowledge involving different multi-stage hacking attacks and techniques that digital adversaries use to execute cyberattacks against enterprise targets.

• Technical Threat Intelligence: Security analysts and incident response teams utilize technical intelligence to collect precise and actionable data on different cybersecurity threats. Data is acquired from cybersecurity reports, threat feeds, news articles, and internal logs during active attacks. 

• Operational Threat Intelligence (OTI): Cybersecurity incident response teams use operational cyber intelligence to understand when, how, and why cyber threats occur. OTI involves monitoring closed channels like private forums or social networks to proactively defend against evolving threats, identify attack patterns, predict targets, and improve incident response capabilities.

Why is Threat Intelligence Research Important?

Threat intelligence is critical to creating a cyber resilient organization. Here is why you should have an action-focused threat intelligence system:

• Proactive Approach: Traditional security approaches rely on reactive threat intelligence. However, solutions that integrate threat intelligence enable the ability to identify potential threats using proactive threat intelligence and end the breach before it starts.

• Faster Recovery Time: During cyber incidents, threat intelligence provides real-time insights into the nature and origin of attacks. Swift incident response minimizes the impact and reduces recovery time. 

• Improved Response Outcomes: During a cyber incident, understanding the attacker TTPs is critical to informing appropriate response actions, remediation steps and recovery to provide more complete response, and secure recovery.  Without leaning on threat intelligence as part of investigations, teams may fail to comprehensively respond.

• Insights Into Threat Actors: Cyber attack defense and threat intelligence software ingests and analyzes operation-centric data to accurately identify threat actors and their motives and tactics. You can keep your business data secure with advanced threat detection and future-ready protection.  

• Stronger Security Posture: By collectively analyzing data, collaborative IT security threat intelligence systems establish real-time, multi-stage, and automated remediation against common adversaries. 

What are the Common Indicators of Compromise?

The most common types of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) are: 

• Network-based anomaly: Unusual spikes in data transfer or communication between unusual ports indicate malware activities or unauthorized access attempts. 

• Swells in database read volume: Sudden increases in database read operations may indicate data exfiltration attempts or unauthorized queries by malicious actors. 

• DNS request anomalies: Abnormal patterns in Domain Name System requests, such as excessive queries to known malicious domains or unusual domain resolutions, suggesting potential malware infections or command-and-control communications. 

• Suspicious registry changes: Unauthorized modifications to Windows registry settings is often used by malware for persistence, configuration, or hiding malicious activities on compromised systems. 

• Geographical irregularities: Unexpected or unauthorized access attempts from unusual geographic locations or regions not associated with typical user or system activities, indicating potential unauthorized access or compromised credentials. 

• Increased requests for the same file: Unusual spikes in requests for a specific file across the network or systems, potentially indicating reconnaissance activities or attempts to locate sensitive information. 

• HTML response sizes: Unusually large or unexpected sizes of HTML responses from web servers could indicate attempts to exploit web vulnerabilities or deliver malicious content. 

• DDoS Threats: Distributed denial-of-service attacks distributed globally via a botnet to flood a target with malicious traffic. These can be volume-based attacks, protocol Attacks, or application layer attacks.

• Malicious IPs: Certain IP addresses are linked to negligently damaging activities, such as command-and-control servers, malware hosting, or actions like scanning and brute-force attacks.

• Configuration Changes: Unexpected modifications to system settings, firewall rules, or security configurations that could weaken defenses or allow unauthorized access.

• High Authentication Failures: Unusually high rates of failed login attempts, potentially indicating brute-force attacks, credential stuffing, or unauthorized access attempts.

• Ransomware: Signs of a crypto virological malware attack that blocks and encrypts data unless the attacker receives a ransom. Modern-day crypto ransomware asks users to pay money to provide a decryption key.

• Unexpected software updates: Unauthorized or unexpected software updates or installations that may indicate compromise or attempts to introduce malicious code or backdoors into systems.

Automated Investigation and Response with Binalyze AIR

Binalyze AIR is an advanced investigation and response  automation platform for SOCs, MSSPs, and Incident Response Service Providers. 

DRONE is AIR’s built-in automated compromise assessment technology which dramatically reduces the time required to identify IOCs in an Incident Response investigation and proactive threat hunting.

The DFIR Lab at Binalyze plays a crucial role in overseeing the upkeep of our internal analyzers, ensuring the latest threat intelligence is embedded into investigation workflows to help sign-post and guide investigations to the areas that matter most. They achieve this by engaging in proactive monitoring of the ever-evolving threat landscape, promptly assimilating emerging rules, and ensuring our analyzers are equipped to address the latest security challenges.

This approach empowers AIR users to maintain the most current rule sets and utilize them proactively in spotting early indicators of the latest attacks. It goes beyond merely identifying vulnerabilities, enabling organizations to take swift action even before the complete malicious payload becomes active or spreads laterally.

Cyber threat intelligence is vital for modern businesses. It provides comprehensive insights into the threat landscape, helping them defend against cybercriminals and respond to cybersecurity breaches more effectively.