What is a Lightweight Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP)?

Ever since the concept of threat intelligence was first introduced, security teams were quick to start asking the question “how do I manage all of that data and operationalize or take action on it?”. Threat intelligence often comes in large volumes of data, usually from different sources, and in different formats. Security teams needed a way to organize, manage, and make sense of all the data so it could be useful for them and their security operations and workflows. This led to the development of the threat intelligence platform (TIP).

Threat Intelligence Platforms: The Enterprise Solution

A threat intelligence platform provides security teams with the capability to ingest and normalize threat data, enrich and analyze it, and then use that intelligence to make informed decisions and take smarter actions. In a nutshell, TIPs are used to turn threat data into operational intelligence that can be used to identify, detect, respond, and mitigate threats.

In order to do all of this, threat intelligence platforms are highly advanced and include an abundance of features, configurations, and potential uses. They have also often required a dedicated threat intelligence team with multiple analysts working in the platform on a regular basis in order to fully manage and operate. This means that it has traditionally required a large budget to support the higher cost of the platform itself along with the dedicated team.

For the most part, this has not been a problem for large enterprise organizations. They are more capable of adding more staff, resources, and tools as they see fit. But what about the rest of the organizations that may not have the budget or headcount to afford or make use of an enterprise TIP?

The Need for a Lightweight Threat Intelligence Platform

Threat intelligence can provide value to a wide range of teams and functions including incident response, a SOC, threat hunting, fraud, application security, threat detection (SIEM), vulnerability management, and even physical security just to name a few. However, barriers created by pricing and bloated feature sets have led to the misconception that TIPs are only for large security teams. Small to medium security teams, and even large security teams that may not have a dedicated threat intel team, should be able to take advantage of threat intelligence in their operations. They need a lightweight threat intelligence platform.

A lightweight threat intelligence platform has the core functionality and capabilities of a TIP, including the ability to ingest, enrich, and act on threat data. The main difference is that a lightweight TIP leverages advanced automation and customizable scoring capabilities to reduce costs and dependencies on headcount while still enabling actionable threat intelligence. This is why we created CTIX Lite, a truly lightweight threat intelligence platform.

CTIX Lite

CTIX Lite was designed so more security teams and organizations would be able to take advantage of actionable threat intelligence. The lightweight architecture means that teams with smaller budgets, staff sizes, and maturity levels would no longer be left behind. CTIX Lite achieves a lightweight architecture through four main areas: automation, customizable scoring, actioning, and easy configuration.

Automation

CTIX Lite uses smart automation throughout the threat intelligence lifecycle by automating the ingestion, normalization, enrichment, and dissemination. The use of automation drastically reduces the amount of time and effort required to collect, manage, and convert both structured and unstructured threat data into actionable intelligence. This results in faster threat intel operations that can be conducted with fewer analysts, which leaves your analysts with more time to spend on critical tasks such as analysis, correlation, and response.

Customizable Scoring

An important part of operationalizing threat intelligence is determining priority and relevance. Most analysts, even those with a traditional threat intelligence platform, have had to do this manually or rely on a scoring system that was not customizable. CTIX Lite (and CTIX as well) offers a customizable scoring engine that users can control and configure to determine indicator scoring based on industry, geography, enrichment score, intel source, TLP, campaign, and more. This custom scoring leads to relevant, high priority intelligence that drives smarter automation rules, decision making, and actioning.

Actioning

Automation and customizable scoring are able to more quickly and effectively identify the right intelligence for actioning. CTIX Lite leverages both out-of-the-box and custom integrations to push this threat intelligence to deployed security tools such as SIEM, firewall, and more for fast, decisive action.

Easy Configuration

At Cyware, we pride ourselves on not selling products but selling solutions. With CTIX Lite, and all of our solutions, we work with customers to help them with the configuration, customization, and set up for their unique needs and organizational requirements. This leads to a quicker time to value and the ability to see benefits sooner rather than later in their security operations.

Interested in learning more about CTIX Lite use cases and if it is a good fit for your organization? Request a CTIX Lite Demo