What is a Cyber Threat Intelligence Platform? A Beginner’s Guide

Cyber threats seem to be outpacing our attempts to rein them in, and the need to keep your business safe online has grown greater than at any other time. Cyber threats are not an issue only for large corporations to be prepared for too.

The risk extends to businesses of all sizes. One of the most valuable defensive tools in this is a cyber threat intelligence platform. Let’s explore this concept and everything to do with it in today’s article.

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Before getting to what the CTI platforms are, let’s try to break down what cyber threat intelligence means.

Cyber threat intelligence is a process of gathering, analyzing, and using information about potential or existing threats that may impact your organization. The intelligence provides security teams with the insights that they need to make informed decisions on the best ways of protecting the networks, data, and employees.

Much of the cyber threat intelligence will fall into one of four categories:

1. Strategic intelligence. This is big-picture information that can aid the top executives in making informed decisions. It includes trends, risks, and the overall threat landscape.
2. Tactical intelligence. This form of intelligence focuses on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) involved in using cybercrimes. Knowing this can help the cybersecurity teams understand how an attack may happen.
3. Operational intelligence. This is the actual attack data and active threats in real-time for rapid response.
4. Technical intelligence. This one contains the technical details, like IP address, domain name, and signature of malware, that indicate a threat.

Generally, cyber threat intelligence helps to identify the threats early and provides the context necessary for their containment or stoppage at their tracks. So what does a cyber threat intelligence solution made by expert teams like ImmuniWeb do?

What is a Cyber Threat Intelligence Platform?

A cyber threat Intelligence software can gather information, organize the threat data in one place, and analyze it—all at once—so it’s easy for the security teams to see what’s going on across their network.

Dedicated platforms like these take info from various sources, including threat feeds, internal network data, and external reporting. Consolidating these feeds, the platform would bring about the latest knowledge to security teams of existing and emerging cyber threats. Instead of using different tools or manual processing, one software makes this process quicker and more efficient.

Key Features of a Cyber Threat Intelligence Platform

It helps to know some of the key features of those platforms made by experts like ImmuniWeb when you’re getting started. Here’s a of what’s usually included in those features:

1. Data aggregation. Threat data provided from multiple sources—threat feeds, internal logs, and third-party sources—provides visibility into the general state of things.
2. Analysis and correlation. Through machine learning and AI, the platform identifies patterns in data that help in threat detection and the prediction of trends.
3. Real-time alerts. A good CTI platform will immediately alert you when a threat is detected to help take quicker responses against a possible attack.
4. Threat scoring and prioritization. Not all threats are of the same level. Usually, platforms score the threats based on the risks they pose to help teams prioritize high-risk alerts over lower-level ones.
5. Integration with other security tools. Generally, those platforms are designed to easily integrate with other tools like SIEM systems, firewalls, and endpoint protection.
6. Automated response capabilities. Many software can trigger automated responses to certain types of threats—known or low-risk types—which can save enormous amounts of time for a team.

Those features allow such software to provide a standardized, structured way for security teams to use all the available data to its full potential.

Benefits of Using a Cyber Threat Intelligence Platform

Why should companies invest in a CTI platform? Here are some of the main benefits:

• Improved response times for incidents. With real-time alerts and analysis from those platforms, the security staff can respond as quickly as possible to a threat, which helps prevent a potential attack.
• Reducing alert fatigue. Typically, security teams will often be bombarded with so many notifications that many of the more serious ones have a good chance of slipping through the cracks. Centralized platforms score and prioritize threats so teams can focus on what matters.
• Proactive defense. Continuous monitoring for threats by such platforms ensures that the risk is highlighted well before a successful attack, which can help in making the defense more proactive.
• Enhanced collaboration. Sharing information across departments or even with external partners is made easier, which leads to better teamwork and, in general, stronger security measures.
• Savings. Even though you’ll need to make an initial investment, those platforms cut down time to detect and respond to a risk, so saving money for a company that may be lost due to a data breach.

Of course, no tool is perfect, and even platforms dedicated to CTI have their set of challenges too:

• Complexity and learning curve. The platforms can be intricate to establish and do take some learning, especially for teams with limited experience.
• Cost of implementation. Most of them are pretty expensive, hence possibly beyond the reach of small companies.
• Data overload. Too much-varied data is coming in, and handling and extracting sense out of this is quite challenging. When it comes to selecting a cybersecurity platform, base decisions considering factors like size, your organization, and any integrations you may wish to achieve.

So as you can see, there are both advantages and potential drawbacks to be aware of. Of course, a final should be made by you with consideration as to what would be best for your business.

Conclusion

Cyber threat intelligence platforms give organizations strong and proactive means of keeping well ahead of the evolving cyber threat. From data gathering and analysis to risk scoring, such platforms make the job of cybersecurity teams much easier and more efficient.

For businesses of any size, it’s an opportunity to level up security and protect valuable data. If your organization is worried about cyber threats, then such a platform could well be the next smart step for you.