Incident Readiness with Threat Intelligence

When your organization experiences a breach or a cyber attack, you need to make decisions quickly and decisively. By integrating threat intelligence into your incident readiness, your team can respond more effectively to attacks. 

What do you get with Flare’s Threat Intelligence Platform? 

How does Flare’s threat intelligence enhance your incident readiness? 

When an incident happens, things can get hectic — especially if you don’t know where the threat is coming from. 

Within incident readiness, Flare can support root cause analysis: as this is often at the identity vector, and root causes are often stealer logs, the platform can aid post-breach investigations. 

How does Flare collect threat intelligence? 

Flare’s platform automatically monitors the clear & dark web — as well as paste sites, public GitHub repositories, and illicit Telegram channels. The platform sends your team 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 has all the pertinent information at their fingertips in the event of an attack.

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

• Alerts that cut through the noise: Instead of inundating your organization with alerts, Flare sends only the notifications that matter most, contextualized and prioritized so your team can take immediate action before and during an incident readiness.
• 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 don’t have to wait for an incident to take place before you can take action. 
• Transparency and trustworthiness: Flare’s Threat Flow presents timely, relevant, and trustworthy summaries of threat actor chatter on the dark web, enabling scaled research and reporting for security teams.

Understanding the Use of Threat Intelligence in Incident Readiness

What is threat intelligence for incident readiness? 

Using threat intelligence for incident readiness involves using detailed and actionable information about potential and actual threats to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of responding to security incidents. This intelligence supports the entire incident readiness lifecycle by providing context, guidance, and insights, allowing security teams to better detect, analyze, contain, and remediate threats. 

What are threat intelligence analytics?

Threat intelligence analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing data related to potential and existing threats. These analytics aim to provide actionable insights that help in identifying, understanding, and mitigating security risks. By leveraging the power of  threat intelligence analytics techniques and tools, organizations can extract valuable insights from vast amounts of threat intelligence data and convert them into actionable intelligence — which makes for a quicker and more effective incident readiness.

What are the types of threat intelligence? 

There are four types of threat intelligence: 

• Strategic threat intelligence: Strategic threat intelligence provides high-level information that senior leadership can use to make decisions about security, summarizing information about potential threats, trends, and their business impact.
• Tactical threat intelligence: Information about the specific tactic, techniques and procedures (TTPs) being used by threat actors. Security teams use tactical threat intelligence to prevent cyberattacks by gaining visibility into the organization’s attack surface, including information about compromised credentials or infected devices.
• Technical threat intelligence: Alerts an organization when an attack is underway and helps block the attack. Security teams use technical threat intelligence to monitor for new threats or investigate a security incident. 
• Operational threat intelligence: Operational threat intelligence gives security teams actionable information relating to threat actors’ nature, motive, timing, and methods that help them prevent or proactively detect an attack. It is often used to anticipate future attacks.

Why is it so Important to Use Threat Intelligence in Incident Readiness Plans? 

Why is threat intelligence important in today’s cybersecurity landscape? 

Going into an incident readiness without context is a disadvantage for your team and your organization. Threats intelligence prepares your team for a threat, giving them context around probable attacks before an incident. This helps your organization strengthen its cyber defenses, hunt for threats, remediate vulnerabilities, improve compliance, and streamline your cybersecurity processes. 

How can you integrate threat intelligence into your incident readiness strategy? 

By systematically integrating threat intelligence into each phase of the incident readiness plan, organizations can improve their ability to detect, analyze, contain, and remediate threats more effectively and efficiently:

• Identify relevant threats and indicators: ensures that your CTI program addresses the most pressing security concerns.
• Contextualize threat intelligence: Enrich the raw threat data you’ve collected with additional contextual information, such as threat actor profiles, attack techniques, and historical trends. 
• Prioritize threat triage: Develop a threat scoring system or use existing frameworks like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to assess and prioritize threats. 
• Use data visualization and reporting: Not all decision-makers understand threat data. Visual representations, such as charts, graphs, and heatmaps, enable non-technical stakeholders to grasp the significance of threat trends and patterns quickly.
• Use automated tools: Automated alerting and readiness mechanisms let your team take swift action in the event of an attack. 
• Monitor continuously: Threat intelligence must be continuous. Automate scanning and regularly analyze data to stay ahead of rapidly changing threats. 
• Create a proactive culture of security: Security is everybody’s job. Educate employees about the importance of threat intelligence, train them to recognize potential threats, and empower them to be active participants in your threat intelligence and incident readiness strategies. 

What is the impact of a cyber attack on your organization? 

When your organization is attacked, you can experience serious consequences, from loss of customer trust to legal issues. The financial cost is steep as well: the average cost of a data breach is  $4.88 million, although many industries experience higher costs. These costs include the cost of finding and remediating the breach, interruptions of operations, legal fees and other fines. 

Threat Intelligence in Incident Readiness and Flare

Flare provides the leading Threat Exposure Management (TEM) solution for organizations. Our technology constantly scans the online world, including the clear & dark web, to discover unknown events, automatically prioritize risks, and deliver actionable intelligence you can use instantly to improve security. Flare can help your team manage and organize threat intelligence so your organization can better respond to attacks when they happen.

Our solution integrates into your security program in 30 minutes to provide your team with actionable intelligence and automated remediation for high-risk exposure. See it yourself with our free trial.