From Data to Defence: Understanding the Impact of Threat Intelligence

21st century threat environments are evolving constantly. As hackers and cyber-criminals develop increasingly sophisticated attack methodologies, businesses are racing to deploy effective countermeasures for both cyber and physical threats. In this climate, protecting your business means not only implementing robust cyber security but understanding as much as possible about the threats you face by developing and optimising threat intelligence. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the security advantages of effective threat intelligence, how software tools help firms enhance the impact of intelligence data, and how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing threat investigations. 

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence refers to the collection and analysis of data as a means to identify current and emerging threats to a business and implement appropriate defensive strategies. Those threats may include:

• Cyber attacks perpetrated by hackers and cyber criminals
• Viruses, ransomware, and malware
• Deepfakes and AI-enabled fraud
• Supply chain disruption
• Nation-state espionage

Threat intelligence is more than the aggregation of data on potential attack vectors. It should be a process of ongoing analysis, coordination and learning, with the goal of developing comprehensive, ongoing awareness of a business’ threat environment. In practice, the process might involve: 

• Analysis of customer behaviour for patterns or abnormalities.
• Tracking of emergent criminal activity, including exploitation of new technologies, viruses and malware.
• Screening of adverse media and watchlists.
• Fusion of data points for actionable security insight.

The complexity of the threat intelligence challenge reflects the diversity of the global risk landscape. Threats to a particular business may be missed as a result of security blindspots, or the sophistication of a new criminal methodology. The deeper and more detailed the threat intelligence picture, the more likely it is that a firm will be able to identify and respond to potential danger effectively. 

Types of Threat Intelligence

Not all threat investigations deliver the same type of actionable insight. Consider the following types of threat intelligence: 

Strategic threat intelligence: Providing a high-level perspective on an organisation’s threat environment, strategic intelligence is most useful for revealing institutional security vulnerabilities and shaping executive-level decision-making. 

Tactical threat intelligence: More focused on specific actors and attack vectors, tactical threat intelligence offers useful detail for security specialists and insight into countering specific threats. 

Technical threat intelligence: Insight into technical threat data and evidence for attacks, which experts may analyse in order to strengthen security measures. Threat intelligence data may include phishing email content, URLs, samples of malware and other attack indicators. Analysis of technical threat intelligence may be time sensitive. 

Operational threat intelligence: Insight into attack strategies, including motive, timing, characteristics and impact. Operational threat intelligence may be derived from the analysis of previous attacks, or even by the direct polling of threat actors such as hackers and cyber criminals. 

Tools and Services for Threat Investigations

The means by which firms gather threat intelligence impacts its quality and utility. With that in mind, specific tools and services may be particularly useful to threat investigation solutions. 

Data collection and analysis: The quality of threat intelligence data will shape its security impact. Software tools can automate the process of identifying and collecting quality threat data, providing valuable speed, efficiency and accuracy, and reducing the potential for human error during manual, repetitive tasks such as data entry. 

Entity extraction: Intelligence-gathering activities typically involve vast amounts of data, which make it challenging for security teams to identify specific threats within unstructured sources without triggering a high volume of false positives. Entity extraction tools can help security teams automatically identify those high risk entities, and even establish connections with other potentially dangerous entities that human employees might have missed. 

Knowledge management: The security impact of threat intelligence depends on a firm’s ability to deploy it quickly and effectively in real-world security situations. Knowledge management software enables firms to organise, collate, record and retrieve data in seconds, and annotate key data points to support decision-making and ongoing investigations. 

Data visualisation: Security software provides the means to represent threat intelligence data in the form of maps, histograms, timelines and other visual interpretations that teams can use to illustrate threats more clearly, and support investigative efforts. 

Threat Investigations and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has significant potential in threat investigation applications. Beyond automating data collection and monitoring tasks, AI-enabled systems and processes, such as natural language processing (NLP) can supercharge analytic capabilities across structured and unstructured data, with the capacity to derive intelligence at a greater scale, and in greater detail than ever before. 

GenAI tools can be deployed across a spectrum of high value threat indicators including the automatic analysis of indicators of compromise (IoC), IP addresses, malware hashes, and more. Supported by GenAI, threat intelligence solutions can identify and extract relevant data in seconds, and present clear concise summaries of that information to support human decision-making. 

From integrating disparate intelligence streams into a centralised source of truth to generating ongoing data feeds that support real-time protection, AI promises to transform the security landscape. Key use cases include: 

Threat hunting: AI algorithms can proactively monitor for emerging threats, including new viruses, malware, and phishing schemes, and feed that information back to security teams in real time. Similarly, AI tools may be able to detect emerging vulnerabilities within an existing security solution. 

Incident response: The enhanced insight that AI-enabled systems provide can accelerate and focus firms’ responses to threats. AI tools can provide, for example, tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) that identify specific threat actors, IoC for networks, and a list of response priorities in the aftermath of an attack. 

Third party risk: Threats often emerge from third parties, including links in an organisation’s supply chain. These types of threat, including anything from expired certifications to nation state espionage, can be extremely challenging to spot, but AI-enabled screening and monitoring algorithms can help firms to capture and connect the necessary data points. 

Next Generation Threat Investigations

Defending your business in an evolving threat landscape can be daunting, but with the right tools, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Ripjar’s Labyrinth for Threat Investigations (LTI) platform is designed to unlock the power of threat intelligence by using a combination of advanced analytics and industry leading AI, machine learning, and data fusion capabilities to visualise threats quickly and simply. LTI offers analysts even more flexibility, providing the tools to develop the platform further, add extra data enrichments to investigations as necessary, and harness the power to mitigate emergent issues. 

Backed by decades of security expertise, LTI offers a cutting-edge solution with intelligence grade security. Deploy multiple workflows out of the box, customise your data feeds to suit your business’ security requirements, and create detailed, fully traceable reports on investigation outcomes. 

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