Threat Intelligence: Do You Know What Threats You Actually Face?

3 mins / Alice Davies

When we speak to business leaders, we’ve seen that many aren’t aware of the specific threat risks to their organisation – a huge threat in itself.

If you can’t pinpoint areas of weakness and vulnerability, how can you expect to fully protect your organisation from harm?

Threat Intelligence may work behind the scenes, but it’s vital in the process of refining your security posture. We’ve gathered all the information you need to know about Threat Intelligence so that you can take the right step forward for your organisation.

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat Intelligence involves researching and evaluating threat trends to establish the patterns, motives and capabilities of cyber attackers and how they could pose a future threat to your business, allowing you to stay up to date on key threat events and make more informed security decisions.

It is often broken down into 3 categories:

Strategic
Tactical
Operational

Indicators of compromise (IoC) are identified – such as IP addresses, an attachment in a phishing scheme or simply an email address – and they are then evaluated to depict the threat actor’s motives and next plan of action.

With this in mind, your business can reflect on evaluated data, as well as relevant questions about the cyber security space, in order to evaluate your own security strategy.

4 Key Features of Talion’s Threat Intelligence and Why It’s Different

The output of a Threat Intelligence team varies from business to business, but to give you an idea, this is why our customers value our Threat Intelligence Team so highly:

Client-Tailored Intelligence – Risk assessments against over 200 threat actors are re-scored regularly to aid customers in internal risk assessments, staff awareness and to perform pre-emptive actions pre-attack.
Open-Source Intelligence – Helps you understand your organisation’s digital footprint by revealing the data cyber-attackers could use to damage your company and its reputation in order to assist in reducing the risk to your business.
Threat Coverage Model – Our Threat Coverage Modelling (TCM) tool is designed on the Mitre Att&ck Model to help customers understand their security monitoring coverage in the context of the Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP) a cyber attacker would use – see below for more insight.

Weekly Podcast – To ensure you’re up to date on all the latest threat developments, we release a weekly less-than-10-minutes podcast – free for anyone to listen to!

Benefits of Threat Intelligence

Threat Intelligence allows your organisation to better understand the attackers who are a likely risk of infiltrating your security systems or using openly available data against you. With a team dedicated to learning about the actions of threat actors, you remain one step ahead, knowing you have the resources to respond with rapid speed if a problem arises.

Here are 5 key benefits of threat intelligence:

✅ Monitors new attack techniques to ensure fast coverage

✅ Helps you stay up to date on the threat news that matters e.g. with a weekly podcast

✅ Offers threat bulletins with actionable recommendations to counteract threats

✅ Tailored intelligence to your business – risk assessed and re-scored regularly

✅ Improves efficiency of your security team

Talion’s Threat Coverage Model

At Talion, we pride ourselves on our threat coverage. Our Rules Team work hand in hand with our Threat Intelligence experts, enabling them to keep their finger on the pulse, our clients up to date and our rules threat relevant.

Our process begins by mapping all our rules against the MITRE ATT&CK model, which gives us an idea of coverage for each client. We then map Threat Actor techniques against this model, giving us greater insight, before risk assessing Threat Actors against each client in terms of relevancy.

All this combined results in the “Threat Coverage Model” and gives a client the visibility of the following:

Top Threats relevant to your business sector/geography
The techniques used by these specific threat actor groups
How our rules defend against these techniques.

Find out more by downloading our Threat Intelligence datasheet.

Talion’s Threat Coverage Model

We hope this has helped give you a sufficient understanding of Threat Intelligence and its importance as part of your security strategy. Whether you choose to do it yourself, or invest in an expert team, staying one step ahead of cyber attackers is key to protecting your organisation with efficiency and speed.

To discover more about Talion’s Threat Intelligence services, visit our webpage or download our Threat Intelligence Datasheet.

Any questions?

We’d be happy to discuss them with you.

Reach out to us via email: hello@talion.net

Or give us a call: 0800 048 5775