Cyber Threat Intelligence: Your Ultimate Defense Against Sophisticated Cyberattacks

In today's digital world, organizations face an increasing onslaught of cyber threats from hackers, cybercriminals, and nation-state actors. To defend themselves, companies need to understand their adversaries' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This understanding comes from cyber threat intelligence (CTI). CTI provides the insights and knowledge needed to strengthen cyber defenses in the face of constantly evolving threats.

What is Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Cyber threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge about current or emerging cyber threats. It encompasses information about threat actors, their motives, targets, and attack behaviors. Organizations use CTI to inform and empower their security strategies, defenses, and response plans.

With CTI, security teams gain an information advantage over adversaries. They make faster, more informed decisions and take a proactive stance against cyberattacks. Cyber threat intelligence enables them to uncover unknown threats, analyze new malware, track threat actor groups, and understand the motives driving cyber campaigns. It transforms cybersecurity from a reactive to a predictive posture.

Threat intelligence draws from both internal and external sources. Internally, companies can analyze network traffic, endpoints, logs, and other telemetry to uncover anomalies and indicators of compromise. Externally, they can leverage intelligence feeds with aggregated threat data and profiles of known adversaries. Together, these sources provide comprehensive visibility into the threats targeting an organization.

The Value of Cyber Threat Intelligence

Threat intelligence provides immense value for security teams and business leaders across an organization:

For IT and Security Analysts

• Prioritize alerts and events based on severity and risk levels determined by CTI.
• Improve monitoring capabilities by integrating intelligence-driven analytics.
• Refine defenses and security controls based on known adversary TTPs
• Automate containment of threats through intelligence-based orchestration

For SOC Teams

• Accelerate triage and investigation with context around threats
• Focus efforts on real attacks rather than false positives
• Enrich alerts with threat intelligence to enable rapid response
• Prioritize incidents based on adversary, campaign, and risk profiles

For Incident Response

• Shorten investigation timelines with information on threats
• Pinpoint root causes faster through historical adversary context
• Uncover all compromised systems based on known adversary behaviors
• Determine long-term response plans leveraging intelligence insights

For Threat Analysts

• Proactively hunt for threats aligned with adversary TTPs
• Pivot from known threats to uncover related or new attack activities
• Map out relationships between campaigns, malware families, and threat groups
• Track trends in adversary behavior and cybercriminal undergrounds

For Executives

• Inform security strategies and budget decisions with intelligence
• Gain visibility into threats targeting the organization and industry
• Understand cyber risks in the business context to enable risk-based decisions
• Track security metrics like time-to-respond based on intelligence outcomes

In summary, CTI enables every cybersecurity role to be more effective and efficient. It provides knowledge that can deeply transform an organization's security posture.

The Intelligence Lifecycle

Generating and operationalizing CTI follows a cyclical process known as the intelligence lifecycle. This lifecycle enables continuous improvement of intelligence and its applications. The stages of the intelligence lifecycle are:

1. Requirements

The first stage is defining intelligence requirements and priorities. This involves determining stakeholders, their intelligence needs, and key knowledge gaps. Requirements generate the objectives that drive the rest of the CTI process.

2. Collection

Next, relevant data is collected from internal and external intelligence sources. This can include threat feeds, technical telemetry, adversary research, dark web sources, and more. Strong intelligence relies on diverse, high-quality collection sources.

3. Processing

In this stage, the collected data is organized, filtered, and structured for analysis. Techniques like natural language processing, data enrichment, and correlation are used to process large volumes of threat data.

4. Analysis

Skilled analysts then pore through processed data to uncover patterns, insights, and intelligence. Structured analytic techniques help analysts minimize bias and assess likelihood. The output is CTI products like threat reports, adversary dossiers, risk matrices, and indicators of compromise.

5. Dissemination

Intelligence is prepared and packaged for different stakeholders in this stage. Reports and updates are created for executives, SOC teams, incident responders, and other consumers. Dissemination focuses on maximizing usability and readability.

6. Feedback

Throughout the lifecycle, analysts seek feedback from intelligence customers. This enables continuous tuning of CTI to be more relevant, timely, and actionable. Feedback ties intelligence producers and consumers together.

By cycling through this lifecycle, organizations refine and optimize their threat intelligence capabilities. They build an intelligence factory that evolves with the threat landscape.

3 Types of Cyber Threat Intelligence

Cyber threat intelligence falls into three categories, each providing different tactical, operational, and strategic benefits:

1. Tactical Intelligence

Tactical CTI focuses on indicators of compromise (IOCs) needed for immediate detection and response. This includes IP addresses, file hashes, domain names, malware samples, and other atomic indicators. Tactical intelligence enables the rapid containment of known threats.

Key attributes:

• Highly actionable and specific
• Rapidly perishable with a short shelf life
• Geared for automated ingestion and alerts
• Supports tactical response to immediate threats

2. Operational Intelligence

Operational CTI provides the context around threats needed for prioritization and proactive defense. This includes threat actor profiles, malware analysis, campaign tracking, and threat modeling. Operational intelligence enriches alerts and guides threat hunting.

Key attributes:

• Provides context around threats and campaigns
• Enables prioritized, risk-based response
• Supports threat hunting aligned to adversary TTPs
• Geared for manual analysis and investigations

3. Strategic Intelligence

Strategic CTI analyzes the broad threat landscape to inform long-term security strategies and decisions. It identifies macro cyber trends, zero-day vulnerabilities, shifts in the underground economy, geopolitics, and emerging technologies.

Key attributes:

• Highly analytical and based on expert insights
• Focused on strategic security planning and budgeting
• Geared for executive decision-making
• Looks beyond immediate threats to the horizon

Together, these CTI types provide threat visibility for teams across the organization. Tactical intelligence drives automated prevention, while operational and strategic intelligence enables expert-driven defense and planning.

Type	Use Cases	Benefits
Tactical	Alerts, IOC scanning, threat containment	Quick detection and response to known threats
Operational	Incident response, threat hunting, alert enrichment	Improved investigation, prioritization, and context
Strategic	Security planning, budgeting, executive reporting	Long-term strategy, resource optimization, risk management

Organizations need all three types to build a mature intelligence-driven security program. Each feeds into the others in the intelligence lifecycle.

CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence

To leverage CTI effectively, organizations need integrated tools and expert analysis. CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence combines automated investigations, malware analysis, and real-time IOC feeds tailored to your environment.

Falcon Intelligence streamlines the intelligence lifecycle within the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. It enriches endpoint, network, and cloud telemetry with CTI for better detection, investigation, and response. Real-time IOCs and threat actor context feed directly into workflows.

For deeper insights, Falcon Intelligence Premium provides adversary tracking and tailored intelligence reports from CrowdStrike's elite researchers and analysts. This helps security teams stay ahead of sophisticated adversaries. Premium offerings include:

• Adversary Intelligence - Profiles and motives on 140+ adversary groups tracked by CrowdStrike. New activity alerts keep teams aware of the latest techniques.
• Strategic Reports - Forward-looking reports on emerging threats, vulnerabilities, geopolitical developments, and other trends.
• Threat Intelligence Workshops - Interactive sessions to optimize intelligence programs, bespoke to each organization.
• Intelligence Requests - Custom intelligence requirements addressed by CrowdStrike's intelligence team.

With Falcon Intelligence, organizations gain an information advantage through CTI tailored to their unique environment and adversaries. CrowdStrike's combination of automated, operational intelligence and deep strategic insights empowers security teams at all levels.

Bolster Your Defenses with Cyber Threat Intelligence

In today's threat landscape, CTI is indispensable for security teams seeking to defend their organizations. With the right intelligence-driven security platform and expert guidance, companies can uncover threats, understand adversaries, and take decisive action against cyberattacks.

Cyber threat intelligence transforms an organization's security posture from reactive to predictive. It provides information superiority over threat actors, enabling rapid detection, informed response, and proactive defenses. To realize these benefits, partner with an industry leader like CrowdStrike to implement proven intelligence-led security. With CTI, organizations gain the ultimate defense against sophisticated cyber threats targeting them today and into the future.