6 Reasons Why Cyber Threat Intelligence Matters (and how CTIA helps)

In today’s technologically developed and evolved world, individuals and organizations alike are constantly connected to the internet to carry out all manner of personal and financial transactions. The internet has become so handy that criminals take advantage of our constant connectivity to steal our information and, in many cases, our money.

In recent news posted by The Guardian, Amazon, the multinational technology giant suffered a major data security breach just two days before Black Friday 2018. In the breach, millions of customer names, passwords, email s, and other personal information were illegally accessed.  However, Amazon did not want to disclose any facts about how many people got affected due to such a security breach. Instead, they informed in a short statement “We have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted.” Customers who received the mail were told the Amazon website inadvertently disclosed some usernames and emails on their site due to a technical issue. When even the world’s leading technology company suffers from security problems, we know there is a problem with the way the world approaches security.

This type of hacking and breaches will continue if organizations do not understand the requirement of a cyber threat intelligence team and how threat intelligence must be part of an overall cybersecurity strategy to keep such hacks and breaches at bay.

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Threat Intelligence or Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is a part of cybersecurity that focuses on the analysis and collection of information on both potential and current cyber-attacks that threaten the security of an organization or its assets. Cyber Threat Intelligence is a proactive security measure that prevents data or security breaches and saves the financial cost required to clean up such a mess after a breach.

CTI’s main objective is to provide companies an in-depth understanding about the cyber-threats that poses the greatest risks to their infrastructure and how to protect their business in the long run. All information provided by CTI teams needs to be actionable to provide proper support to the organization.

Why Is Cyber Threat Intelligence Important?

Cyber threat intelligence gathers raw information about new and existing threat actors from many different sources. CTI teams then analyze the collected data to produce appropriate threat intelligence management and feeds reports full of only the most important information that can be utilized by automated security control solutions and management to make security decisions for the company. The fundamental purpose of this kind of security is that it helps to keep companies informed of the advanced threats, exploits and zero-day threats that they are most vulnerable to and how to take action against them.

Six Reasons Why CTI Matters

Here are six reasons why cyber threat intelligence really matters:

1. Lowering Costs – Cyber threat intelligence can lower your overall expenses and save your business capital because improved defenses help mitigate an organization’s risk. In the aftermath of a data breach, the enterprise not only suffers data loss but it also has to bear with many costs like post-incident remediation and restoration, fines, lawsuit fee, investigation expenses, damage to their reputation and market position and more. The data breach of Equifax in 2017 cost the company over $600 million that include government investigations and lawsuits.

2. Lowering Risks – Cybercriminals with the intention or ability to harm others and organizations are continuously exploring new ways to penetrate organization networks. Cyber threat intelligence provides proper visibility into such emerging security hazards to reduce the risk of information loss, minimize or block disruption in business operations, and maximize regulatory consent.

3. Avoid loss of data – A cyber threat intelligence system acts as a watchdog when suspicious IP addresses or domains try to communicate with your network to collect important information. Here, a cyber threat intelligence system helps in preventing or blocking such addresses from infiltrating the network and stealing sensitive data. These intrusions, if not responded to in time, may turn into a distributed denial of service attack causing extreme damage to a system.

4. Maximizing staffing – A threat intelligence system improves the efficiency of the security team of an organization by correlating threat intelligence with anomalies flagged by tools on the network. A threat intelligence team can integrate threat intelligence into an organization’s foundation to lower security response time and allows the company’s staff to focus on other essential tasks.

5. In-depth Threat Analysis – Cyber threat intelligence really helps the organization analyze the different techniques of a cybercriminal. By analyzing such cyber threats, the organization can determine whether the security defense systems can block such an attack.

6. Threat Intelligence Sharing – Sharing crucial cybersecuirty information, such as how hackers’ plan a security breach, might help others prevent such an attacks from ocurring. The more the organization can defeat these attacks, the less the hackers execute such devastating attacking plans.

Source: eccouncil.org