Can cyber threat intelligence benefit everyone?

CYBER THREAT intelligence (CTI) has, in recent times, created a lot of buzz in the realm of enterprise cybersecurity.

It is essentially a set of information and data gathered on the latest tactics, tools, and signatures of threats by cybercriminals and hackers alike.

Equipped with this intelligence, security teams are able to defend their networks and systems proactively, while constantly upgrading their defenses as threats become increasingly sophisticated.

CTI provides security systems with warnings and indicators so that companies can mitigate the risk, improve threat response, and make better, more timely decisions.

While the benefits of cyber threat intelligence are clear, it comes with its own sets of challenge and thus is not suitable for every organization.

Unlike many digital solutions in the modern era, CTI is not easily deployable, and to derive value from it, a certain degree of organizational maturity and investments are required on top of getting access to the threat intelligence feed.

One of the biggest issues that most companies face is that CTI is often inherently siloed. Threat feed providers are generally not aware of the business context of the threats they list and leave end-users to figure out the business risk.

Need for additional resources and investments

While larger organizations may be able to contextualize the threats, mid- and small-sized companies may not have the resources or IT maturity to leverage the CTI.

For some bigger enterprise, however, CTI is often made an integral part of their cybersecurity agenda. But to deploy it effectively, they also often heavily invest in the necessary systems and tools, personnel, training, and partnerships.

Once all the systems are in place, CTI provides a holistic picture of the threat landscape that these organizations are facing, which allows them to come up with robust defense strategies to protect their networks.

Many industry observers and experts rightfully pointed out that these problems are caused by over marketing of the solution, even to those that aren’t quite capable of using it.

The truth is, a majority of the organization could not afford to assemble a team dedicated to CTI and implement enterprise-wide processes that could take advantage of CTI.

Knowledge sharing is pivotal

One way to mitigate the lack of expertise and awareness gap on leveraging CTI is knowledge-sharing exercise through cooperative partnerships with industry associations, government agencies, and cross-sector sharing forums.

Co-operative partnerships also provide a golden opportunity for vendors to develop solutions that could address new threats effectively, although progress on this front has been relatively slow.

Ultimately, companies should realize that CTI is a critical tool that helps transform cybersecurity beyond the reliance of static indicators to having a 360-degree view of the threat landscape.

To move toward a proactive, predictive model of mitigating cyber threats, organizations must find ways to develop the capabilities to deploy CTI or identify a strategic business partner to do so.

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