The Role of IOCs in Threat Intelligence Data Collection

As digital technology continues to evolve in nearly every business today, threat intelligence data collection has garnered a lot of attention, helping companies to make an informed decision about their network security. With frequently reported cases of revolutionary cyber threats to business organizations, risk management executives need to incorporate real-time cyber threat intelligence to fight attacks and address system vulnerabilities. Threat intelligence analysts rely on accurate data collected on IOCs to effectively carry out their roles and responsibilities on the security system.

What is threat intelligence in cybersecurity?

Threat or information security intelligence in cybersecurity is the knowledge of collecting and analyzing data to use them to understand and prevent cyber attacks. It also outlines the security vulnerabilities in your system that need to get fixed to protect your sensitive data from the paws of cybercriminals. This kind of detailed and strategic cyber threat intelligence presents a clear roadmap for your IT security team to enhance your security posture.

What does threat intelligence data do? Why is it important?

Nowadays, organizations collect and analyze a massive amount of data across multiple security systems. On top of that, there are limited professionals available to handle the stream of data, increasing the burden on a few data analysts available. Threat intelligence provides the solution to data collection issues and treating them all.  Some of the best threat intelligence solutions utilize the latest Machine Learning (ML) tools to automate everything right from data collection, processing, and loading it into your application database. ML tools help in organizing data collected from various sources and try to match a common point between these data. The tools feed in the Indicators of Compromise (IoC), Indicators of Attack (IoA) along with the tactics of threat actors to get an optimal result.

Why is cyber threat intelligence important?

There are tons of advanced and sophisticated cyber threats trying to outsmart the security system of vulnerable organizations. Cyber threat intelligence will provide an overview of your attacker, allowing you to work at mitigating the threats and forestall future attacks proactively. In the context of cyber intelligence analysis, IoC plays a defining role in determining the characteristics, motives, and the tactics behind an upcoming attack. The IT security team can zero-in on the specific set of data out the large chunks of data on the ground. This data condensation lessens the burden on the security team as they don’t need to deal with a massive chunk of data. According to security experts, even though not all cyberattacks are related to each other, but most of them are just a variant of one or the other. Threat hunters and analysts during threat analysis on a compromised system look for suspicious URLs, IP addresses that helped in bypassing network security.

Threat intelligence helps in analyzing these IoC’s and provides a detailed picture of how to safeguard your system against these kinds of threats in the future.

How do you use cyber threat intelligence?

Organizations are using cuber threat intelligence to accomplish the following:

Predict: The best threat intelligence program handled by experienced and skilled professionals can primarily help organizations to mitigate any kind of cyber threats in the future.

Prevent: Businesses mostly rely on threat intelligence reports not only to predict any impending attacks but also to stop them in the first place. These cyberthreat programs can utilize malware and virus signatures to detect and prevent virus attacks.

Detect: Threat intelligence cybersecurity programs help organizations detect attacks in the future and detect any anomalies or vulnerabilities that exist currently.

Respond: With all data on your hand, including the motive, tactics, and the threat actors involved in the impending attacks, you can plan your next move easily. Threat intelligence reports help organizations to respond to attacks in the best way possible by enhancing their security posture.

Source: eccouncil.org