Companies face significant cyber threats that can disrupt their operations, expose their sensitive data, and negatively affect their reputation. As a result, they need a proactive security approach to protect themselves from these threats because the damage can be costly to resolve. Threat intelligence helps in this endeavor by providing insights into the cyber threats that threaten an organization. These insights help companies strengthen their cybersecurity measures, spot vulnerabilities, and adequately respond to emerging threats.
What is Threat Intelligence?
This is the process through which organizations collect, analyze, and use information about potential cyber threats to proactively identify and nullify them. Threat intelligence involves gathering data from multiple sources, like security incident reports, threat intelligence-sharing communities, open-source data feeds, and security feeds.
All findings are analyzed and converted into actionable intelligence companies can use to make informed cybersecurity decisions. Cybersecurity experts use software to carry out threat intelligence. Here are the ten best threat intelligence solutions they can use to achieve the desired result.
Why is Threat Intelligence Necessary?
All companies should safeguard their data and protect themselves from malicious actors. These are ways threat intelligence helps them achieve those objectives:
Proactive defense
Companies use threat intelligence to proactively mitigate cyber threats instead of acting after they occur. Some cyberattacks can take a computer network offline for a lengthy period. It might also take a long time to rid the system of malware that infects the network entirely. Proactively identifying threats significantly reduces the likelihood of a cyberattack being successful.
Early threat detection
Threat intelligence software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect patterns indicative of cyber attacks before they manifest in an organization's computer network. This early detection allows companies to anticipate attacks and exposes the vulnerabilities in their system. It also gives them time to respond to the emerging threat before it harms their system.
Improved cybersecurity decision making
Organizations that use threat intelligence will be able to make informed cybersecurity choices because they will have substantial data on the threats they face. This insight will guide their security investments, resource allocation, and IT infrastructure setup. It will also help cybersecurity experts protect the organization better as they will know the exact security risks the company faces.
Threat Intelligence Challenges
Threat intelligence is beneficial to companies that use them, but it has some challenges that they should consider when implementing it like:
Large volume of data
Threat data can pile up over time and take up a lot of storage. Therefore, companies should be able to manage and analyze large volumes of data to extract necessary insights.
Technical expertise
Companies need skilled cybersecurity personnel to interpret threat data and identify cyber threat patterns. These qualified personnel can be costly to hire and retain on their payroll.
Time sensitivity
Threat intelligence works best when the findings are acted upon quickly. Information gathered from this process can quickly lose relevance as events within the organization unfold.
Endnote
Most organizations depend on technology, cloud computing, and the internet, making them vulnerable to cyber threats. They have to protect themselves from these threats, and threat intelligence is invaluable to that objective. It gives companies proactive threat detection capabilities, strengthening their cybersecurity measures and safeguarding them from cyber criminals.