Cyber criminals take significant time and effort to infiltrate organizations for financial gain, posing various threats. Under the rising threat landscape, cybercrime intelligence could be one of the saviors for security preparedness of enterprises.
Cyber threat intelligence refers to collating actionable information about cyber threats. This data reaches the security team after processing data and classification according to reliability. Security analysts use secondary data from trusted sources and structured trading techniques to investigate threats thoroughly.
Security experts need to employ cybercrime intelligence tools to identify potential threats and the attack methods. This intelligence helps them stay prepared for attacks, and help to reduce their risk and impact.
One of the critical components of threat intelligence is knowing where to search for information. Attackers use diverse channels to launch attacks, including the deep web or dark web, making it increasingly challenging to identify the sources of threats.
Therefore, security teams must be familiar with these hidden and often overlooked parts of the world of cyber-crime. To proactively prevent attacks, organizations must also understand the risk apertures that attackers can exploit.
CISOs should integrate cybercrime intelligence tools into their security infrastructure to ensure comprehensive protection.
Why Is Cybercrime Intelligence Important?
Organizations are facing increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. There are still skill shortages that have become a challenge for effective security for CISOs. experts are developing effective AI tools to assure companies of threat intelligence, as an advance strategy to identify risks.
Tools and data are now the two biggest support that they have, to do the job well. It has become crucial to improve threat intelligence capabilities to address the gaps in cybersecurity.
To protect digital infrastructure and assets successfully, it’s essential to have actionable threat intelligence. It is only then that organizations can accurately identify and prioritize risks. This knowledge enables them to implement the appropriate tools and techniques to respond to threats efficiently.
Good cybercrime intelligence allows teams to prevent cyber-attacks by analyzing data about attackers, their capabilities, and motives. It gives enterprises the heads up and advance threat information. This could also help them to plan for and counter attacks, which could otherwise be crippling.
As per the findings of the Cybersecurity Ventures Cybercrime 2023 report,
Attackers employ various approaches depending on their goals. They could launch brute force attacks, carry out credential stuffing, exploit software vulnerabilities, and inject ransomware. Therefore, it’s crucial to collate advance intelligence of how attackers plan to target organizations. It will enable security leadership and teams to put together an effective cyber security plan.
Cybercrime intelligence enables enterprises to anticipate, prevent, and mitigate possible cybercrime threats effectively. It enables security teams to examine prospective risks and attack strategies. This knowledge enables firms to the predict the modus operandi of cyber criminals, and plan for countermeasures against attack vectors.
Threat intelligence enables teams to access data on attackers’ skills and motivations and understand how they will come next.
The Process of Cybercrime Intelligence Gathering:
Here is how a business needs to go about deploying a good cyber intelligence process. CISOs should
- Set up early warning systems to detect hazards, threats, and fraud.
- Have in place an Informative counsel who can help you focus your investigative priorities
- Identify access vectors and collect information against cybercriminals who use those vectors.
- Profile cybercrime occurrences using common intelligence frameworks and cyber kill chains.
- Perform Blockchain forensics for attribution and fund recovery.
- Create personalized intelligence products to use on a regular basis. this could complement a managed service tool.
- Provide incident response teams with timely and relevant intelligence.
Security teams should undertake regular risk assessments considering the organization’s risk profile, historical data, and industry-specific comparisons. They can then analyze the large volume of cybercrime intelligence data to make informed decisions.
to gather this data, a specific process is necessary. First of all, regular penetration testing of the infrastructure is critical. This data will reveal the state of their health. Any gaps will then be identified even before the attacks happen.
This is proactive security intelligence, which can actually help to keep the CISO team prepared for any attacks. With this knowledge they can leverage the most appropriate threat intelligence streams and sources.
Risk evaluation should be a continual process that allows teams to analyze and change priorities as per evolving threats.
One critical activity is to ensure that the cyber threat intelligence is collated in accordance to data and privacy regulations.
One way of doing this is to identify the objectives of intelligence collation. This will help to set limits for and create guidelines for collection of sensitive information.
It will enable security teams to focus solely on vital data, and create explicit ethical norms for intelligence-gathering activities.
Also read: Three Best Practices to Identify Cybercrime in a High-Risk Environment
Evaluation of Quality of Cyber Intelligence
CISOs can evaluate the efficiency of cybercrime intelligence in their cybersecurity strategy using two main indicators and KPIs:
- Mean time to detect (the time required to detect a security threat or incident).
- Mean time to respond (the average time incident responders take to control, remediate, and eliminate a danger after it is recognized).
Leveraging Cybercrime Intelligence for Better Security stance
Businesses can use threat intelligence in several ways as part of their security strategy. To start building a threat intelligence program, here are some of the most effective ways:
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Embrace a Proactive Intelligence Strategy
Threat intelligence can help shape security policies and discover holes in defenses before they are attacked. The obvious first step would be to put gatekeepers at various data entry levels- to identify and predict threats. to do this, they need to identify who should have access to company infrastructure. They need to be clear on who should have how much access to what data.
Then, they need to also keep updated with the fixes and upgrades that software needs.
Access to vulnerability data helps to keep cyber threat intelligence updated.
This data is especially helpful when added to an automated incident reaction pipeline. It then becomes more accurate in helping determine the impact of an attack. Teams can predict the attacker’s next move and limit damage by knowing what they are doing and why they are doing it.
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Integrate threat intelligence strategies with existing security policies
Threat intelligence systems cannot deliver insights in isolation. It needs to be integrated with a whole cyber security process, or policy- to identify anomalies.
Threat intelligence should be a part of an automated system that looks for unusual events and behavior trends.
One of the most suitable environments where threat intelligence works well, is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). Most companies use this security solution to predict threats. These offer a single location for keeping an eye on things and gathering data about security.
When integrated in the SIEM system, threat intelligence tools collate the data to create predictive insights, and deliver better security threat intelligence.
The learnings form an incident can also be incorporated into threat management tools. This can identify early warnings of suspicious activity.
This intelligence can actually prevent future incidences- they can be caught early on, and responded to in a timely manner.
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Cut down on alert fatigue
When the security team gets too many alerts, it often makes it difficult for them to handle all the data. Using disparate tools to gather data and setting low alert limits are two other things that can lead to alert fatigue.
Threat intelligence helps to reduce threat fatigue. It sorts through security data, identify the most important alerts, and eliminate the rest. It ensures that security teams never miss important alerts because they deal with the most important problems first.
An incident alert management system also moves and rotates alerts based on which members are available.
Conclusion:
The threat of cybercrime evolves along with the advancements in technology.
Additionally, the cybercrime ecosystem is creating new threat actors every day, by reducing the barriers for novice criminals to collaborate with more experienced ones.
Cybercrime intelligence is critical for the safety stance of a company. It gives firms advance information about threat or nature of an attack. It can also reveal the many strategies and methods cyber criminals use to attack businesses.
The goal of a good cyber threat intelligence policy and tools is to keep a business forewarned about the risk.
It also outlines the risks to data, networks or infrastructure, studying the nature of the expected attack.
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