How Small Security Teams Can Operationalize Threat Intelligence
CTIX Lite • Sep 18, 2020
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CTIX Lite • Sep 18, 2020
Many believe that cyber threat actors only attack big organizations. However, the reality is quite different from that. According to the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 28% of data breaches in 2020 involved small organizations with small to medium-sized security teams. Small security teams are seeing the need to improve their security posture by proactively defending against threats. If they don’t, they stand the risk of data breaches and also an irreversible loss in brand reputation.
Imagine you are the head of a small security team in a large organization. Your firm has faced a cyberattack and your team is struggling to understand what is happening, what data is being impacted by the attack, and what can be done to mitigate the attack. This happens mainly because either the security team is stretched for resources or does not have the security maturity to handle the situation. Threat intelligence can be crucial in these situations to gain a better understanding and awareness of an attack by driving real-time situational awareness and also providing insight for the security teams to be able to minimize the damage by initiating a takedown to remove malicious domains, brand mentions, data leaks, and more.
Threat actors are becoming more versatile in other approaches as well. They have been attacking across multiple industries and geographies with no fixed pattern. The real question that needs to be addressed is what are organizations doing about it already. Particularly, what can small teams do to safeguard their organization from being the next big headline of a cyber news article? For that, we need to take stock of the operations of small security teams in organizations and their pain points.
Security teams in organizations are responsible for manually ingesting threat intelligence, processing, analyzing, enriching, segregating, and finally taking action on it, all in real-time. This becomes difficult for an organization with small security teams. There is a voluminous amount of threat intelligence that needs to be operationalized on a real-time basis. Manually ingesting, consolidating, and processing IOCs becomes a cumbersome task. Additionally, small security teams also lack the resources and security maturity to start using a full-fledged threat intelligence platform.
A Solution for Small Security Teams
That’s where a lightweight threat intelligence platform like Cyware Threat Intelligence eXchange (CTIX) Lite steps in. A lightweight threat intelligence platform leverages security automation and customized indicator scoring to help small security teams take action on threat intelligence. It does so by giving you the features that you truly need instead of overloading you with features that you don’t use.
In our webinar, “Doing More with Less: How Small Security Teams Can be More Efficient & Resilient”, one of the key problems of security analysts related to the setting up of threat intelligence workflows and the need for security automation was discussed. CTIX Lite solves this problem. It automates end-to-end threat intelligence workflows, starting from the ingestion of IOCs from multiple sources to finally actioning the enriched and analyzed threat intelligence. CTIX Lite consolidates the IOCs and normalizes them to STIX format. CTIX Lite helps you map the adversary attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used at different stages of the attack lifecycle. The normalized threat intel is then enriched from trusted sources such as VirusTotal, WhoIs, NVD, and others.
Taking action on the analyzed and enriched threat intelligence is an equally important process in threat intelligence automation. The actions which analysts can automate in CTIX Lite include blocking an IOC, pushing to SIEM, taking actions on Firewalls, and many more. This stage of automation saves thousands of hours for analysts and in turn, makes life easier for small security teams.
CTIX Lite is a lightweight threat intelligence platform that is high on functionality and low on price which is ideal for small security teams who like to take real-time actions on threat intelligence.