Actionable Threat Intelligence

Not all threat data is created equal. Some data is relevant and will help your team prevent or mitigate an attack. Other threat intelligence may not apply to your organization, and just adds to the alerts and noise your team deals with every day. To effectively mitigate threats, your organization needs clear, relevant threat data. In other words, you need actionable threat intelligence. 

How Does Flare Deliver Actionable Threat Intelligence?

Why use Flare to find actionable threat intelligence? 

When you’re constantly getting notifications about every potential threat — even if those threats aren’t relevant — things can get noisy. The alerts that matter most can get lost in the shuffle and important information can slip through the cracks. Flare automatically scans, analyzes, and contextualizes threat data so that your team only sees the information they need in order to spot and remediate a threat.

How does Flare offer your team actionable threat intelligence? 

Flare automatically scans for threat intelligence, continuously monitoring the clear & dark web — as well as prominent threat actor communities elsewhere — and sending your team prioritized alerts when it detects your organization, employees’ names, domains, IP, or any other key information so your team can find leaked or stolen data and take action quickly. When your proprietary information appears in places it should not be, Flare lets you know where it is and how it has been compromised. 

What are the key benefits of Flare’s threat intelligence solution? 

• A proactive security stance: By actively seeking out potential threats, you can catch breaches early and take steps to protect your enterprise’s data, systems, and networks.
• Interpretation of alerts: Not every threat actor speaks your language. Flare’s AI Assist helps your team by translating relevant threats, as well as by interpreting threat data in ways that will make sense to your enterprise’s leadership. 
• Automated continuous monitoring: Using an automated solution gives you 24/7 coverage, keeping you on top of your enterprise’s data security. 

Actionable Threat Intelligence: An Overview

What is actionable threat intelligence?

Actionable threat intelligence is specific, timely, and relevant information about potential or ongoing cyber threats. It can be used to make informed decisions about mitigating or preventing threats and risks. Actionable threat intelligence goes beyond raw threat data by providing your team with context, analysis, and recommendations that can be directly applied to enhance your organization’s security posture.

What makes threat intelligence actionable? 

Actionable threat intelligence has a few key characteristics: 

• Specificity: It provides detailed information about a threat, such as indicators of compromise (IOCs), threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and potential targets within the organization.
• Timeliness: It is delivered in a timely manner, allowing your security team to respond quickly to an emerging threat before it can cause significant damage.
• Relevance: It is tailored to the specific needs and context of your organization, ensuring that the intelligence is pertinent to the organization’s environment and threat landscape.
• Contextualization: It includes contextual information that helps your security team understand the broader implications of a threat, such as a threat actor’s motivations, the potential impact on the organization, and historical attack patterns.
• Next steps: It provides clear recommendations or steps that your team can take to mitigate or prevent a threat, such as updating security controls, applying patches, or blocking malicious IP addresses.

How is threat intelligence gathered?

Enterprise threat intelligence is collected from a wide range of sources including: 

• Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): OSINT is data that is publicly available. It comes from sources like the media, social media, forums and any other content that is publicly accessible. 
• Closed source intelligence: Closed source intelligence comes from proprietary or restricted information sources, such as commercial threat intelligence feeds, private forums, underground marketplaces and dark web sources. 
• Internal security data: Your own data can provide valuable security insights. You can pull this information from network logs, security event logs, endpoint telemetry, firewall logs, intrusion detection system (IDS) alerts and any other internal security data sources you may have.
• Incident response data: Incident response data includes information about past security incidents, including the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed by threat actors provides important lessons learned, enabling organizations to understand attack patterns and refine their defenses. 
• Industry and information sharing communities: Industry-specific information sharing communities and collaborating with trusted peers can provide valuable threat intelligence. Sharing insights, best practices, and threat intelligence within these communities allows organizations to gain access to a broader range of threat data and collective knowledge. 
• External threat feeds and integrations: External threat intelligence feeds from reputable sources provide real-time updates on things like emerging threats, indicators of compromise (IOCs), malware signatures, and malicious IP addresses or domains.

Why is Actionable Threat Intelligence So Important to your Organization Right Now? 

Why invest in actionable threat intelligence in today’s threat landscape?

We are constantly inundated with data in our daily lives. It’s no different at work; security teams have to sift through the noise to find the threat information that is relevant to them. By using a solution that automatically surfaces the most important threat data, your team can efficiently and effectively respond to threats and vulnerabilities. 

How can actionable threat intelligence help stop breaches? 

Your team can’t prepare for a threat they don’t know about. Good threat intelligence shines a spotlight on possible threats before an attack even takes place. It can help your organization strengthen its cyber defenses, hunt for threats, remediate vulnerabilities, improve compliance, and streamline your cybersecurity processes. 

What is the impact of data theft?

The average cost of a data breach is $4.45 million. This is just an average, however: many industries experience higher costs. These costs include the cost of finding and remediating the breach, interruptions of operations, legal fees and other fines.

Actionable Threat Intelligence and Flare

The Flare Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution empowers organizations to proactively detect, prioritize, and mitigate the types of exposures commonly exploited by threat actors. Our platform automatically scans the clear & dark web and prominent threat actor communities 24/7 to discover unknown events, prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security.

Flare integrates into your security program in 30 minutes and often replaces several SaaS and open source tools. Learn more by signing up for our free trial.