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Long gone are the days when corporate cyber security consisted of declaring policies, setting up firewalls, and frantically weeding out viruses from the network after the worst has happened. A systematic approach for proactive, preventive defense is now essential for business sustainability. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is a cornerstone of this approach.
CTI is all about research and analysis of data on cyber threats, attacks, and actors in pursuit of actionable insight where actionable implies tailored to a specific business with its peculiar scope, risks, goals, and resources.
Threat analysis has proved to be useful for a number of goals:
Fortify resilience: trace weaknesses in defenses, enforce proactive improvements.
Reduce risk exposure: preemptively identify and mitigate threats before they impact the business.
Optimize spending: by focusing on high-priority threats, CTI helps reduce costs associated with breaches.
Respond faster: security teams can react to incidents more quickly and effectively.
Guard the reputation: spare the trust of your customers and favorable brand perception.
Regulatory Compliance: many industries require companies to demonstrate strong cybersecurity practices, and CTI supports compliance with standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
Things To Do to Introduce CTI in Your Security Framework
Here are five basic steps for better defense based on threat intelligence strategy and tools.
Start your journey to cyber security through research and analysis with understanding what exactly you need to do and at what scale.
Without clear objectives, a CTI program can degenerate into a cargo cult without meaningful outcomes. All it is good for would be wasting resources. A focused approach ensures the program supports business goals, such as safeguarding customer data or preventing operational downtime.
Decide what the company aims to achieve with CTI. Is it reducing the time of incident detection and response? Or understanding industry-specific threats? A solid goal could be preventing supply chain attacks or insider threats.
Set the scope. Is your team going to focus on specific types of threats (e.g., phishing, ransomware)? Which assets, departments, or regions need the most protection?
Finally, align the objectives with business priorities, resources, and risk appetite.
Data is the fuel of threat intelligence. Your team needs reliable sources of constantly updated information to expose risks early and understand the threat landscape.
Threat data can be harvested from internal and external sources. The former are the elements of your security infrastructure: firewalls, endpoint protection systems, SIEMs, and other internal logs.
The latter include threat feeds (open-source or commercial, like ANY.RUN TI Feeds, forums, dark web monitoring. Finally, there are third-party intelligence services.
Such services, like ANY.RUN TI Lookup, aim to meet the specific needs of security professionals, providing them with tools for discovering and exploring data. They support search operators and their combinations.
This is an example of a simple search via Threat Intelligence Lookup. We have searched for recent phishing attacks that users from Israel have reported and analyzed via ANY.RUN’s Interactive Sandbox, a virtual environment for malware detonation.
The results feature dangerous files, malicious links, phishing emails, and hashes that can be used for detecting all these indicators.
Such a search request is just a first step into an intelligence journey for actionable insight.
Get 50 requests free to test Threat Intelligence Lookup
Raw data without context is often meaningless and overwhelming. Analysis transforms scattered information into actionable intelligence that helps prioritize responses and strengthen defenses.
Analytic tools like Threat Intelligence Lookup help to identify patterns, anomalies, and correlations. That's why ANY.RUN's Interactive Sandbox is integrated with TI Lookup: every piece of malware can be decomposed into a set of indicators of compromise, events, processes, techniques, and tactics for further research. Frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK are used to map raw data for getting a comprehensive picture of adversary behaviors.
It is equally important to contextualize findings to the company’s industry, geography, and specific threat profile. For example, a fintech startup should prioritize data breaches or ransomware, while a healthcare company might focus on phishing and medical IoT device exploits.
Corporate threat intelligence is of no use unless it’s aligned with business goals and objectives — and brought into action. By integrating it into daily operations, a company minimizes the chances of a successful attack. Automated threat detection reduces incident response time and mitigates possible losses.
Set up tools like firewalls, IDS/IPS, and endpoint security systems to block threats automatically in real time.
Incorporate CTI into incident response workflows. Use intelligence to evaluate and prioritize alerts and investigate incidents.
Share intelligence across teams within the company. SOC staff can use it for immediate detection and response. IT and development can use it to patch vulnerabilities. Executives can use it for strategic decision-making.
Participate in information-sharing communities (e.g., ISACs) to contribute and receive sector-specific intelligence.
Threats are constantly evolving, and static approaches are not what you can allow. All the protections would become obsolete in no time. A feedback loop of monitoring and improvement ensures the CTI program adapts to new challenges and remains relevant.
Regularly review the effectiveness of CTI efforts: are they providing useful insights? Are these being efficiently integrated? Are tools cost/profit-effective, and processes adequate?
Upgrade threat models and priorities as the company’s risk landscape evolves.
Conduct post-incident reviews to understand how you could improve the use of CTI.
Stay informed about advancements in CTI tools, frameworks, and threat trends.
The CTI tools of your choice must provide you with features enabling you to stay on top of threat landscape evolvement. An example of such features is Lookup Notifications in Threat Intelligence Lookup by ANY.RUN.
They allow users to subscribe to specific search queries and get instant alerts when new results appear. For instance, you can get automated updates on new URLs and domains associated with a specific malware and set up alerts in case they show up in your network traffic.
Tracking emerging and evolving cyber threats with Lookup Notifications is an element of the proactive approach we’ve been talking about so insistently. It empowers better threat management and response strategies.
Cyber threats are an essential part of the environment a modern company exists in. Proactive security is what lets you survive, adapt, and evolve in this environment. Employ cyber threat intelligence solutions like ANY.RUN’s TI Lookup to build strong protection with business goals and strategy in mind.
