Threat Intelligence Management

Threat intelligence is a critical tool for security teams. However, when security teams are inundated with threat intelligence from a variety of sources, it can become overwhelming. For teams to effectively use threat intelligence, proper threat intelligence management is essential. This means that intelligence must be identified, categorized, and analyzed so that your team can see, at a glance, which pieces of information are most relevant to your organization.

How Does Flare Help with Threat Intelligence Management? 

Why use Flare to manage threat intelligence? 

There is a lot of threat intelligence out there and it comes from many different sources. Teams can collect intelligence from scanners, different threat intelligence tools, social media, illicit chat rooms, paste sites, GitHub repositories, and other clear and dark web sources. However, manually sifting through that amount of information is daunting at best and impossible at worst. Even with automated alerts, sorting through the noise to find relevant information can be time consuming. Flare provides organizations with contextualized insights, delivering only the notifications that are relevant to your organization in this evolving threat landscape.

How does Flare manage threat intelligence? 

Flare automates the process of scanning for threats, monitoring the clear & dark web — as well as paste sites, public GitHub repositories, and illicit Telegram channels — continuously, and sending you 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. Because Flare only sends alerts when they’re relevant, your team can then analyze and prioritize the information. 

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

• Automated continuous monitoring: Using an automated solution gives you 24/7 coverage, so you will know as soon as your information appears where it should not be. 
• Visibility into the deep and dark web: Flare’s monitoring solution scans the deep, dark, and clear web, as well as illicit Telegram channels, to find leaks before an attack happens. 
• A proactive security stance: By actively seeking out potential threats, you can catch breaches early and take steps to protect your data, systems, and networks.

Threat Intelligence Management: An Overview

What is threat intelligence management? 

Threat intelligence management refers to the tools and processes used to collect, normalize, and enrich cyber threat intelligence data so your security teams can act on it. Threat intelligence is used by security teams to inform the way they write detection rules and engage in threat hunting. By managing data gathered from various intelligence tools in a threat intelligence platform, organizations can aggregate data from across various solutions and intelligence tools in a single platform, which allows them to mitigate risks effectively and efficiently.

Where is threat intelligence gathered from?

Threat intelligence solutions gather information from a range of sources including networks, applications, software, open source intelligence (OSINT), government data, third party paid feeds, dark web forums, illicit Telegram sources, human sources, and scans of the web focused on particular keywords or information. When this information isn’t in one central platform or location, managing it can be overwhelming for your team. 

What are best practices for threat intelligence management? 

• Aggregation of intelligence: To manage threat intelligence well, your team must gather all data into a single location or platform. This eliminates the time-consuming and overwhelming task of reviewing every feed and source individually.
• Automated data processing: Manual data processing is tedious, time-consuming, and can generate errors. While you can use a spreadsheet to aggregate data, it’s not optimal: spreadsheets can get duplicated and saved elsewhere, for example, or a single error in a column can create problems later. Automation frees up your team for higher-order tasks, while improving your organization’s ability to analyze threat data. 
• Integration of threat intelligence with your existing security tools: Normalizing your threat intelligence enables you to integrate it into your current cybersecurity technology stack. By using a threat intelligence platform, you can connect your contextual data to existing tools and build better and stronger detection rules.
• Incorporate threat intelligence into incident response: Threat intelligence gives your incident response team the context the need to investigate incidents faster. By pointing them in the right direction, you can help them contain threat actors fast.

Why is Threat Intelligence Management So Important Now? 

Why do organizations need threat intelligence management? 

Threat actors are constantly talking with one another on the dark web and on illicit Telegram channels, discussing TTPs and potential targets. Organizations don’t always have the same advantage. Without the same level of threat intelligence, it can be difficult to counter their attacks — especially if they are communicating in another language. If criminals are using threat intelligence, it stands to reason that your organization should be as well, and it’s also important that the threat intelligence is organized and well managed, so that your team can use it well.

What are some challenges when it comes to threat intelligence management? 

There is no shortage of threat intelligence, however, when an organization is inundated with irrelevant or repetitive alerts, this can cause problems. Teams may waste time on threats that don’t impact the organization, for example, which can take away from other, more important tasks. To reduce the noise and volume of alerts, intelligence needs to be prioritized and contextualized. 

How can well-managed threat intelligence stop breaches? 

When it’s managed well, threat intelligence can make a huge difference to the security of your data. Organized threat intelligence can help your organization strengthen cyber defenses, hunt for threats, remediate vulnerabilities, improve compliance, and streamline your cybersecurity processes. 

Threat Intelligence Management 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.