These days the word ‘intelligence’ pops up in any conversation on security. Why is the industry cannot get enough of it? What is the difference between intelligence and information? What is intelligence-led security? Let’s take a look.

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solution effectively deal with information security challenges and provide better defence against cyber threats. However, the organizations must be aware of important questions before deploying the SOAR solution. The following sections will take a deep dive to elaborate on these questions.

Is your CSIRT team facing too many security alerts? Is your SOC has various security products that are jumbled together? Are you worried about setting the sensitivity of each product? How a severity level should be assigned to each imminent incident? These questions are hard to answer by today’s security professionals. However, security orchestration plays a crucial role in helping experts to address these questions.

Threat hunting is the practice of iteratively and proactively hunting for threats or Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) that are launched by adversaries. Unlike traditional security systems such as antivirus program, firewalls, or SIEM, who use a reactive approach to threats, threat hunting utilizes a proactive approach to pursuing threats even before they compromise organization’s network or IT infrastructure.

Malware Analysis is the process whereby security teams such as Incident Response Handlers perform a detailed analysis of a given malware sample and then determine its purpose, functionality, and potential impact. Conducting malware analysis manually is a cumbersome and time-consuming process as it involves a lot of security professionals, resources, and budget.

An organization can have innumerable VPN access attempts from within or outside its facility. In the world of globalization and cloud computing, even these attempts can be made from outside the country. Checking each attempt manually is a daunting task for enterprises as it consumes a lot of time and engages more security professionals. The basic VPN checks involve DNS Leaks, IP Address Leaks (e.g., IPv4 and IPv6), and WebRTC Leaks.

Vulnerability management is a proactive approach that mitigates or prevents the exploitation of IT vulnerabilities that may exist in corporate critical systems or network. This approach involves a number of steps that include identification, classification, remediation, and mitigation of numerous vulnerabilities. According to CVE Details Report, 15703 vulnerabilities have been identified in 2018, compared to 14714 in 2017.

Phishing is the bad act of luring users to visit the malicious websites that apparently seems legitimate. The purpose of phishing is to trick users into revealing sensitive and personal information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and so forth. More often, threat actors carry out phishing attacks by sending suspicious links or attachments through Emails and social media websites.

The cognitive tools/technologies of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are impacting the cybersecurity ecosystem in a variety of ways. Applied AI machine learning and natural language processing are being used in cybersecurity by both the private and public sectors to bolster situational awareness and enhance protection from cyber threats. The algorithmic enablers that make ML and AI pinnacles of cybersecurity are automation and orchestration.