Threat actors are no stranger to cyber reconnaissance. Reconnaissance is often the first step of a cyber attack, as threat actors prod your infrastructure for weaknesses and potential attack vectors. For this reason, it’s critical that security teams engage in cyber reconnaissance as well, and that such reconnaissance be continuous and cover as much virtual ground as possible.
Cyber Reconnaissance: An Overview
What is cyber reconnaissance?
For defenders, cyber reconnaissance in cyber security is a strategy that involves gathering information about potential threats and vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Threat intelligence like this is critical to a strong cyber defense; reconnaissance provides important data about potential attacks and threat trends.
What are the four types of threat intelligence?
- Strategic: Strategic threat intelligence provides a high-level overview of threats allowing senior leadership to make decisions based on the current threat landscape. Because it’s aimed at business leaders, strategic threat intelligence focuses on non-technical information.
- Tactical: Tactical threat intelligence focuses on malicious actors’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), providing insight into potential attacks and an attack’s possible impact.
- Technical: Technical threat intelligence is the information that security teams usually get from their open-source intelligence feeds. Security teams use technical threat intelligence to monitor new threats or investigate security incidents.
- Operational: Operational threat intelligence gives security teams actionable information relating to threat actors’ natures, motives, timing, and methods.
How do criminals use cyber reconnaissance?
Threat actors want to be prepared before they attack an organization. Just like criminals committing a crime in person, cyber criminals prepare for a crime by first surveilling the target. Think of a burglar who wants to break into a house. Their first step is to investigate the house to find easy points of entrance and identify valuables. Cyber criminals do the same thing, scanning your systems, networks, and web applications for vulnerabilities. This lets them plan an attack in advance.
How is cyber reconnaissance typically performed right now?
Today, most organizations conduct reconnaissance on elements such as unpatched servers, misconfigurations, and data leaks once a year. This method of conducting reconnaissance provides a snapshot of a moment in time, rather than a full picture of your security. In a fast-evolving cybersecurity landscape, once-a-year audits simply can’t provide adequate continuous coverage across the entirety of the organization’s external threats. This approach often leaves cybersecurity blindspots that can be exploited by malicious actors.
Why automate cyber reconnaissance?
Manual reconnaissance is always reactive. Most enterprises don’t have the resources to conduct manual reconnaissance on a continuous basis. It’s time-consuming and requires the efforts of highly skilled domain experts. Plus, manual reconnaissance does not provide adequate continuous coverage across the entirety of the organization’s external attack surface and often leaves it open to malicious actors. Without automation or software to provide insights, enterprises are forced to be reactive to cyber risks, which can cause greater costs for the enterprise in the long term.
Why is cyber reconnaissance important right now?
Why is cyber reconnaissance a necessary tool in today’s digital landscape?
It can be difficult to be proactive in security; especially your security team is always reacting to threats. However, with a steady stream of strong, relevant threat intelligence, your analysts can take a more proactive stance against threats. Cyber reconnaissance gives your team a chance to catch their breath, assess threat data, and make a proactive plan to mitigate vulnerabilities. This is particularly important for understaffed security teams, who need to plan for future attacks and don’t have time to manually scrape for data.
How can cyber reconnaissance platforms help stop breaches?
Integrate the world’s easiest to use and most comprehensive cybercrime database into your security program in 30 minutes.
Strong reconnaissance can make a huge difference to the security of your data. A good cyber reconnaissance platform serves up the most relevant intelligence, which helps your organization strengthen cyber defenses, hunt for threats, remediate vulnerabilities, improve compliance, and streamline your cybersecurity processes.
What is the impact of a data breach?
The average cost of a data breach is $4.88 million. This figure includes the cost of finding and remediating the breach, interruptions of operations, legal fees and other fines. However many industries experience higher costs, which can be devastating for small and midsize businesses.
How Does Flare Enable Cyber Reconnaissance?
How does Flare’s cyber reconnaissance work?
Flare’s threat intelligence platform automates the process of scanning for threats. Flare continuously monitors the clear & dark web for leaked and stolen data and any other information that can help your team plan for an attack. Whenever your data — including the name of your organization, employees, or any other sensitive data — appears, Flare notifies your team so they can take action fast.
Why do security teams use Flare for cyber reconnaissance?
The cyber threat landscaping is always growing and changing. Threat actors are constantly changing their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), and your own attack surface is always expanding. By using Flare, your security team can stay on top of trends in risk, monitor your growing attack surface, and know exactly when your data has been exposed. This helps them respond quickly to threats and proactively prepare for potential attacks.
What do you get with Flare’s cyber reconnaissance solution?
- Proactive cybersecurity: Continuous scanning of the clear and dark web for data leaks
- Endpoint security: Monitoring for malicious activity on public-facing assets
- Data leak prevention: Detection of data breaches and data leaks
- Compliance: Strengthened compliance with data privacy regulations
- Less noise: Immediate, relevant alerts when issues are discovered
- Translation: Not all threats are in English. Flare’s AI-powered assistant translates notifications in languages your team doesn’t speak.
Cyber Reconnaissance 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.
