Why Is Threat Intelligence So Important and How Does OTX Work?

Technically, threat intelligence is the process of understanding the threats to an organization based on available information. It combines various data and information in order to determine relevant threats to the organization. If right threat intelligence is consistently available to you, it greatly helps you to remain ever-attentive and observant.

 

Threat intelligence can help you solve the following problems:

1. How do I keep up to date on the overwhelming amount of information on security threats, including bad actors, methods, vulnerabilities, targets, and so on.
2. How do I get more proactive about future security threats?
3. How do I inform my business leaders about the dangers and repercussions of specific security threats?

The first step for an organization to improve its information security capabilities with threat intelligence is to choose appropriate sources of the intelligence.

A. Internal Threat Intelligence:
Information that is gathered from within the organization itself is considered as internal threat intelligence.

B. External Threat Intelligence:
Information that is gathered from outside the organization - from the internet, newspapers, books and other external sources, such as Open Threat Exchange (OTX), are considered external threat intelligence.

 

Threat intelligence is often broken down into three subcategories:

1. Strategic — Broader trends typically meant for a non-technical audience
2. Tactical — Outlines of the tactics, techniques, and procedures of threat actors for a more technical audience
3. Operational — Technical details about specific attacks and campaigns

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 How does OTX Work?

OTX provides open access to a global community of threat researchers and security professionals. It now has more than 100,000 participants in 140 countries, who contribute over 19 million threat indicators daily.

It delivers community-generated threat data, enables collaborative research, and automates the process of updating your security infrastructure with threat data from any source.

OTX enables anyone in the security community to actively discuss, research, validate, and share the latest threat data, trends, and techniques, strengthening your defenses while helping others do the same.

AlientVault USM Anywhere and OSSIM have OTX pre-enabled, but OTX also works with Bro-IDS, Suricata, TAXII, etc too.

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Why Is Threat Intelligence So Important?

Let us now see the power Of Threat Intelligence…

1. Improved Patch Management Process

True CTI can help GRC teams with 'patch management'. Using actionable weakness and exploitation data, your team can prioritize when to patch which vulnerability.

2. More Effective “Attack Surface” Protection Systems

CTI plays a significant role in enhancing the effectiveness of your existing security tools, especially SIEM.

3. Situational Awareness & Event Prioritization

High fidelity CTI lets SOC teams to prioritize which events are most important by delivering more power to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. For example, the OTX pulses provide you with a summary of the threat, a view into the software targeted, and the related indicators of compromise (IOC) that can be used to detect the threats. These IOCs include:

• IP addresses
• Domains
• Hostnames (subdomains)
• Email
• URL
• URI
• File Hashes: MD5, SHA1, SHA256, PEHASH, IMPHASH
• CIDR Rules
• File Paths
• MUTEX name
• CVE number

4. Find & Fix Everything

True CTI assists forensic teams to determine incident attribution and make sure they discover and fix everything impacted. Figuring out who is attacking you is not possible without focused threat intelligence.

5. Incident Response (IR) Attribution & Messaging

CTI can help incident responders recognize who is targeting their organization. This enhances communications across the business, resulting in more timely response.

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When you begin working on threat intelligence, then you do it by comprehending the organization’s security plan. Security planning often starts with determining what the business needs to protect it from harm, and employing policies and procedures to do so.

Threat intelligence can help the organization comprehend which areas of the business attackers are most likely to target and use those insights to effectively protect valuable assets.

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