Threat intelligence provides valuable insight into contextual business risk. You can gain insight into threat actors targeting your industry or information from your organization located on the Dark Web. According to one report, 79% of security professionals find threat data feeds essential to their organization’s cybersecurity posture. Additionally, 63% of respondents noted that they use feeds to ensure a better defense.

Incidents of ransomware have been increasing and evolving steadily for years as financially motivated adversaries shift tactics when one is no longer profitable. Unfortunately, many organizations haven’t been able to adapt their security operations to keep up. Back in 2019, 60% of organizations told ESG that they experienced a ransomware attack that year, with 29% reporting that attacks happened at least on a weekly basis.

There’s no doubt that an analyst’s ability to efficiently share curated threat intelligence has a significant impact on the success of their organization’s overall security operations. In fact, this capability is so important that removing barriers to sharing threat information is the first requirement outlined in the Executive Order issued by the White House on May 12, 2021.

Most organizations have more threat intelligence than they know what to do with, from a variety of sources – commercial, open source, government, industry sharing groups and security vendors. Bombarded by millions of threat data points every day, it can seem impossible to appreciate or realize the full value of third-party data.

This is the third of three blogs in a series to help the energy and utility industries. You can read the first blog on Ransomware and Energy and Utilities and the second blog on Threat Intelligence and Energy and Utilities as well.

Use of cyber threat intelligence in a security operations center is an essential part to attain a strong security posture. Therefore, since cyber threat intelligence is that important, understanding the general framework of it is also vital.