A Guide to Maximizing Your Threat Intelligence Budget

In today's ever-changing cyber threat landscape, organizations are under the constant threat of cyber-attacks. The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors are evolving and becoming more sophisticated. As a response, threat intelligence programs can provide organizations with valuable insight, while also informing preparation and response activities. But with limited security budgets facing many organizations, how can you ensure you're getting the most value out of your investment?

In this blog post, we will discuss the steps your organization can put into action to help maximize the effectiveness of your threat intelligence program investment.

Prioritization: Targeting the Right Threats

The first step to maximizing your budget is trying not to “boil the ocean” when it comes to threat intelligence. The volume of cybersecurity-relevant information and noise generated from various threat intelligence sources can be overwhelming, and trying to gather intel and prioritize information in real time can limit the effectiveness of your program.

How can you ensure your program focuses on the threats that truly matter?

• Assess Your Current Threat Intelligence Program Maturity: To understand where you want to go, you first need to have a clear picture of where you are in your threat intelligence journey. The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a great tool to help judge where you are from a program maturity perspective, starting from Level 1 (Initial) to Level 5 (Optimizing). Performing an honest assessment of your current threat intelligence program and capabilities will help to uncover the gaps that may be holding the program back from reaching maximum effectiveness.
  
  
• Conduct a Threat Landscape Assessment: The next step is to understand the current state of cybersecurity threats relevant to your industry and organization. This involves identifying attack vectors, common attack types, and the TTPs being utilized by threat actors in the wild that are targeting organizations in your sector. Publicly available resources like industry reports, threat actor profiles, and open-source threat intelligence (OSINT) feeds can provide valuable insights and are a great starting point.
  
  
• Identify Your Crown Jewels: Your “Crown Jewels” are your most critical assets, and the ones that are most likely to be highly targeted by threat actors. While these assets will differ for each organization, start with identifying assets and systems that are vital to running day-to-day operations, and those that house critical data such as intellectual property, sensitive customer information, financial records, etc. Prioritize threat intelligence collection and analysis efforts around these assets.
  
  
• Develop a Threat Model: If you have already successfully completed the first three steps, you can move onto developing threat models that outline potential attack scenarios. This helps you understand the specific TTPs threat actors might use and the vulnerabilities they might attempt to exploit. Use these threat models to further enhance and mature your threat intelligence priorities.
  
  

Beyond What’s Publicly Available: Investing in Reliable Sources

Your threat intelligence feed will only be as valuable as the data you can collect. While publicly available data sources can be beneficial, there is ultimately a limit. These feeds and reports can become antiquated, can contain misleading or incorrect information, and can be misaligned with your organizational threat landscape.

Here are some resources to help align threat intelligence with your organizational goal:

• Commercial Threat Feeds: Prioritize investing in reputable commercial threat intelligence feeds that provide high-quality data, and more importantly, actionable data. These feeds are typically generated by security experts, where threat intelligence is their primary area of focus, and they can offer in-depth analysis of current threats, including Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and threat actor TTPs. When evaluating commercial threat feeds, it is important to consider feeds that are tailored to your industry and specific threats to your organization.
  
  
• Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs): ISACs are an excellent tool to gain industry-relevant threat intelligence. With a wide variety of ISACs available, from aviation to healthcare industries, organizations can greatly benefit from participating in this cost-effective membership. Benefits include a centralized resource for cyber threats, analysis, collaboration with industry peers, and information sharing between the public and private sectors.
  
  
• Internal Threat Intelligence: Lessons learned from internal data can be another valuable and cost-effective tool for your organization. Analyzing past incidents, security logs, and user behavior analytics (UBA) can all be used to identify potential threats and security risk patterns within your organization.
  
  

Collaboration: Expanding the Reach of Threat Intelligence

While security teams may be the primary stakeholders managing threat intelligence programs and the data being ingested, in order to fully maximize the effectiveness of your program, collaboration and information sharing throughout the organization is key.

Here are some ways to expand the effectiveness of your threat intelligence program:

• Integrating with Security Operations Centers (SOCs): Whether managed in-house or by a trusted third-party, integration between your threat intelligence program and SOC is paramount. Threat detection and response processes, along with automation capabilities, can be greatly enhanced from threat intelligence feeds. Threat intelligence can also aid SOC analysts in prioritizing investigations relevant to emerging threats.
  
  
• Security Awareness Training: Threat intelligence can also play a role in enriching security awareness training programs. By understanding the TTPs being used by threat actors, along with common attack vectors, your organization can help to ensure that employees remain vigilant to identify and report suspicious activity.
  
  
• Cross-Department Collaboration: Sharing threat intelligence and insights with other departments or business units such as IT operations, legal, human resources and public relations can improve overall security posture. For example, a threat actor group could be carrying out a sophisticated spear-phishing campaign targeting organizations’ human resource team members. Being able to provide this information and details of the attack methodology to human resources personnel could help prevent a successful attack from taking place.
  
  

By following these steps, you can help to ensure your threat intelligence program is an investment that continues to provide value to your organization, rather than a budget line item that continually needs justification and defending. As we have discussed throughout this blog post, there are numerous ways to implement a successful threat intelligence program, without being a huge drain on budgetary resources. By focusing on your priorities and goals, investing in the right resources, and expanding the reach of your threat intelligence program, you can maximize your threat intelligence budget, and build a stronger, more resilient defense against cyberattacks.

To find out how K logix can help you enhance your threat intelligence program, please contact info@klogixsecurity.com.