Vulnerability Intelligence

Brand new software vulnerabilities are detected every day, making vulnerability management a priority for your security team. However, with so many new vulnerabilities, it’s easy for teams to become overwhelmed, unable to patch every application and remediate all vulnerabilities all at once. Vulnerability intelligence gives your team some breathing room, so they can prioritize the most pressing vulnerabilities and secure your business’s assets.

How Flare Supports Vulnerability Intelligence

Why use Flare to aid vulnerability intelligence?

Vulnerability management platforms collect vulnerability intelligence through scanning your IT environment. They can organize thousands of software vulnerabilities along with how often they are exploited in the wild.

With Flare’s Threat Flow, security teams can see what CVEs are mentioned in illicit sources. This information can be formatted into a text-based report to further discuss and share with relevant stakeholders.

Along with a purposeful vulnerability intelligence platform, your team can route intelligence from Flare into action.

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 business’s data security.

An Overview of Vulnerability Intelligence

What is vulnerability intelligence?

Vulnerability intelligence is the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about security vulnerabilities in software, hardware, and systems. This type of threat intelligence helps organizations understand, prioritize, and mitigate risks posed by these vulnerabilities to their digital assets and infrastructure. By predicting which vulnerabilities threat actors are most likely to exploit, security teams can prioritize their remediation activities, focusing on vulnerabilities that potentially have the most impact.

How is vulnerability intelligence gathered?

Gathering vulnerability intelligence involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from a variety of sources to identify and understand security vulnerabilities in systems, software, and hardware. However, this can be tricky. Manually filtering useful data out of a large volume of information is challenging for teams, as is identifying zero-day vulnerabilities. Some of the sources of threat intelligence include:
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.

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Is vulnerability intelligence the same as threat intelligence?

Vulnerability intelligence is a kind of threat intelligence, but the two terms should not be used interchangeably. While vulnerability intelligence is concerned with bugs, vulnerabilities, and unpatched software, threat intelligence refers to all intelligence about potential threats to your organization or data.

Why is vulnerability intelligence especially relevant now?

Why do you need vulnerability intelligence in today’s threat landscape?

With so many platforms and applications, security teams are constantly seeking out vulnerabilities in devices and platforms. New risks appear daily, and your team needs to know how to prioritize each risk. By using a solution that automatically surfaces the most important threat data, your team can efficiently and effectively respond to vulnerabilities.

How can threat intelligence help stop breaches?

Your team can’t prepare for a threat they don’t know about. Good vulnerability intelligence shines a spotlight on the most likely threats, and the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited 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 $4.88 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.