Cyber risk intelligence is a cornerstone of modern security posture. The threat landscape is always evolving and developing sophisticated attacks. By leveraging cyber risk intelligence, organizations can proactively defend against relevant threats and bad actors.
Cyber Risk Intelligence: An Overview
What is cyber risk intelligence?
Cyber risk intelligence is the process of gathering and analyzing critical information on potential threats, data breaches, and leaks. Armed with this data, organizations can learn valuable and actionable insights to protect themselves.
The intelligence provides personalized action plans for organizations to understand their vulnerabilities, identify potential cyberattacks, and anticipate future threats. Risk intelligence enables organizations to develop proactive cybersecurity postures instead of relying on a reactive response.
What are the benefits of incorporating cyber risk intelligence?
Other key benefits of cyber risk intelligence include:
- Ensure informed decision-making for risk management.
- Improve identification of new vulnerabilities, bad actor tactics, and emerging threats.
- Allocate resources more effectively.
- Implement proactive mitigation strategies.
- Share real-time insights for incident response.
- Provide industry-specific cybersecurity risks.
Overall, cyber risk intelligence aims to analyze the latest trends that bad actors are deploying and ensure organizations receive personalized insights on how to secure their specific systems and operations.
How is cyber risk intelligence created?
There are several key steps to create cyber risk intelligence:
- Data collection: Information is gathered from several sources on the current threat landscape. This includes open-source intelligence (OSINT), internal systems, external databases, threat intelligence feeds, dark web monitoring, and other reliable sources.
- Data processing: The data is analyzed to find patterns and trends that are transformed into contextual insights. The insights are developed with a specific organization’s needs in mind. This ensures the insights are relevant and considers elements like compliance frameworks and third-party vendors.
- Data dissemination: Once data is analyzed, it’s shared with relevant stakeholders. Timely access to data is critical for effective risk intelligence. Security teams need to respond to threats quickly to ensure systems stay secure. They can only make informed decisions if they receive risk intelligence based on timely and accurate data.
By incorporating risk intelligence into their security framework, organizations are able to implement proactive security measures and safeguard their infrastructure.
What is the difference between cyber risk intelligence and cyber threat intelligence?
Cyber risk intelligence and cyber threat intelligence are closely related but have different outcomes. Threat intelligence focuses on gathering data and identifying potential threats. It includes collecting data on bad actors, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Organizations can learn about emerging threats and vulnerabilities with threat intelligence.
Meanwhile, risk intelligence takes the threat intelligence, analyzes it, and develops actionable risk insights to mitigate the threat. Risk intelligence provides context for how a threat can impact an organization. It can help assess the potential damage of a threat, including asset value, vulnerability severity, and business impact. Risk intelligence can help inform decisions about mitigation strategies and which risks to prioritize.
Why is cyber risk intelligence important in today’s landscape?
As cyber threats grow and develop in complexity and sophistication, organizations must keep up with these developments and fortify their systems. The truly valuable part of risk intelligence is that it provides organizations with proactive insights into threats that directly impact them.
Not gathering threat data and risk intelligence only harms an organization. Without accurate and timely intelligence, an organization significantly increases its risk of becoming a victim. It may suffer from an attack that could have been prevented. The consequences could lead to data exposure, financial losses, regulatory investigations, and reputational damage.
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What are the challenges of gathering threat intelligence data?
Several challenges can impede effective cyber risk intelligence data:
- Data overload and noise filtering: Thousands of data points from various sources are overwhelming to sort through. It can make it difficult for organizations to determine what is relevant to them and create actionable intelligence.
- Ever-evolving threat landscape: Bad actors are constantly looking to enhance their methods to evade cybersecurity. Outdated data may not effectively depict the current trends of cyber threats.
- Ensuring relevance and accuracy: Low-quality or inaccurate data can lead to false positives that only use a security team’s limited resources. It may also lead to issues like overlooking valid threats.
How to resolve cyber risk intelligence challenges
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) play a significant role in overcoming these challenges. They can enhance intelligence capabilities and aid in real-time monitoring, analyzing, and responding to cyber threats. Threat Intelligence as a Service (TIaaS) is an impactful solution for utilizing AI and ML.
AI-powered cyber risk intelligence can examine massive datasets quickly and accurately. Security teams are immediately notified of relevant threats so they can improve their response time.
The importance of sharing threat intelligence is also growing. It provides valuable data to reduce the risk of successful attacks.
The collective approach among organizations improves the overall cybersecurity defenses as they learn from each other’s experiences. By sharing real-time information, threats are identified sooner and organizations can respond more effectively.
Managing Cyber Risk Intelligence with Flare
Researching the complex cyber threat landscape isn’t a small job. There are millions of bad actors and manually monitoring the scene isn’t a feasible solution.
Flare automates the data intelligence process, so security teams can focus on taking proactive measures to respond to threats. Flare can identify potential attack vectors, profile threat actors, and help prioritize security measures that need immediate attention.
What do you get with Flare cyber risk intelligence?
The Flare data intelligence solution includes:
- Automated 24/7 monitoring of the clear and dark web
- Unmatched data collection, analysis, and insights
- Prioritization engine that minimizes noise
- Full transparency of data sources
- Proactive security stance to protect data, systems, and networks
- Translation of threat conversations in foreign languages
Flare and Cyber Risk Intelligence
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. Cyber risk intelligence ensures that your security teams receive timely and relevant data about the current threat landscape.
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.
