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 is also vital.

It is increasingly common to hear about cyber threats to energy and utility industries. These are malicious acts by adversaries that target our data, intellectual property, or other digital assets. All too often it seems as though energy and utility companies are put in a defensive position to battle it out with these cyber intruders. How can the industry switch to a more offensive position when it comes to understanding these threats?

SIEMs have been around for decades, designed to replace manual log correlation to identify suspicious network activity by normalizing alerts across multiple technology vendors. SIEMs correlate massive amounts of data from the sensor grid (your internal security solutions, mission-critical applications and IT infrastructure). As organizations are looking at ways to mine through SIEM data to find threats and breaches, they are bringing in threat intelligence feeds to help.

For many years, cybersecurity professionals have talked about the OODA loop. Devised by Colonel John Boyd, it describes a decision-making cycle that fighter pilots apply in dog fights, and when mastered, allows them to outwit adversaries. The acronym stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, and if you can go through this decision cycle faster than your adversary, you can defeat them.

The new SANS 2021 Report: Top Skills Analysts Need to Master analyzes the need for organizations to invest in improving their security operations and identifies the skills analysts must master to support this initiative. Characterizing an analyst as essentially an investigator, the SANS report breaks the investigative process down into two primary areas: Investigative Tasks and Investigative Thinking.

Threat intelligence solutions provide security teams with critical context on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and the threat actors seeking to exploit them. This helps organizations to respond proactively and efficiently to threats. Yet while all threat intelligence tools offer the core feature of basic information about cybersecurity threats, they vary significantly in the ways they make available that data.

As organizations continue to evolve their security operations maturity and the SOC increasingly focuses on detection and response, three capabilities are foundational for success – threat intelligence, integration and automation. In a recent webinar, “Evolution of CTI – Use Case in a Modern SOC,” ThreatQuotient’s Yann Le Borgne, together with Ben van Ditmars of Atos and Martin Ohl from McAfee tackle this topic.

Your brand is the image your customers have of your business; this is precisely what makes your brand into such a valuable asset. It’s no surprise that brand presence is increasingly shifting into the digital realm. And while digital transformation brings with it a whole new world of possibilities, the digitization of the brand also introduces new risks.

If anyone has benefitted from the pandemic, it has been cyber attackers. As businesses expanded their investment in cloud resources and other IT resources in response to the pandemic, cyberattacks also dramatically increased. Businesses reported 445 million cyberattack incidents in 2020, double the rate for 2019. It didn’t have to be this way. With stronger threat intelligence solutions in place, many of the security incidents of 2020 could likely have been averted.

After a year full of unknowns and new normals, knowledge is power. The spike in cyber breaches in the past year, compounded by COVID-related attacks, has only increased the importance of cyber threat intelligence (CTI). The 2021 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey, sponsored by ThreatQuotient, explores the state of play in the global use of CTI and outlines why the difficulties of the past year have contributed to the continued growth and maturity of CTI.