Securitytrails as a Threat Intelligence Platform

The number of cyberattacks is increasing rapidly, leading to significant losses in businesses' revenue and reputation. According to Cyber Security Ventures, the global cost of cybercrime is projected to reach USD 10.05 trillion by 2025 annually. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CT-I) is the act of collecting threat data from various sources to help organizations better understand adversaries, their motivations, attack techniques, tactics, and the preferred attack vectors they employ. CT-I will also boost an organization's ability to discover new and unknown threats. By knowing such information, organizations may foster their security defenses by adopting proactive security measures to become more prepared for future attacks. In this post, we'll be shedding some light on popular threat intelligence sources, the threat intelligence lifecycle, CT-I platforms and how to use our own Securitytrails products for threat intelligence data collection. Threat intelligence sources A security team should gather threat data (including indicators of compromise) from various online sources, both free and commercial, to ensure the most comprehensive threat intelligence coverage possible. The three primary categories of CT-I sources are: Vendor data: Every organization utilizes IT infrastructure and technologies purchased from one or more vendors. For example, routers, switches, server operating systems, and other security appliances such as Firewalls and ID-S,IP-S systems. Most IT vendors have a private threat intelligence feed. Customers can often subscribe to remain up to date with the latest threats, and discovered vulnerabilities, targeting their specific IT infrastructure and deployed software. Public sources: Government agencies mainly operate these at no cost. Examples of public CTI sources include: FB-I. SANS Internet Storm Center. US Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT). Private sources: These are commercial enterprises that provide threat data for a fee, commonly on a subscription basis. Some commercial threat data sources could be Accenture Security Cyber Defense, Booz Allen Cyber Threat Intelligence Services and Crowdstrike. Cyber threat intelligence lifecycle For the threat intelligence gathering to be successful, a proper methodology or framework should follow. A general CT-I lifecycle is formed from the following phases: Requirements: Defining the goals from collecting the threat intelligence data and the methodology we will use to achieve these goals. Collection: Threat data is collected from various sources such as public and private sources, security solutions logs, public posts on social media platforms, darknet forums and websites hosting leaked information. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques are utilized to discover threat information posted on publicly available sources during this phase. Processing: The gathered data is organized into a format to be interpreted easily by the security team. Analysis: The security team will analyze collected data and transform raw data into information that can be consumed to make informed decisions to protect the organization's digital assets. Feedback: The outcomes are delivered to relevant stakeholders, usually at regular intervals. Reports typically contain recommended courses of action and allow stakeholders to evaluate. Threat intelligence platforms and tools The volume of data collected from different threat intelligence sources can be overwhelming. Tools are used to filter results and help the security team keep the most relevant data according to their requirements while discarding the rest. There are different tool sets to aid in CT-I endeavor; however, using a threat intelligence platform is considered the ideal option for organizations to aggregate data from multiple sources in an efficient, organised, and automated manner. A threat intelligence platform is a system that can be deployed either on cloud or on-premises. It helps an organization collect data from vario...