Strategic Threat Intelligence: CYFIRMA Helps Organizations Understand Their Security Landscape

At the onset, from an organization’s perspective, Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) may seem like a single comprehensive discipline, but in reality, it can be broken down into subcategories that address individual steps in the overall cyber threat intelligence process. These subcategories include Strategic Threat Intelligence, Management Threat Intelligence and Tactical Threat Intelligence.

As part of this blog series, we will address these subcategories individually. The primary focus here is to understand how threat data is collected, analysed and employed to enhance security at an organizational level.

Let us start with Strategic Threat Intelligence.

What is Strategic Threat Intelligence?

Strategic Intelligence offers insights into cyber risks by attributing threat actors, their background, motives, tools and techniques. It allows the organization’s to apply cyber intelligence to strategy, governance and policies. This is primarily consumed by the key decision makers within the organization.

In more detail, Strategic Threat Intelligence offers risk-weighted threat intelligence applied to an organization’s overall business strategy thereby enhancing its ability to proactively and continuously optimize the security posture based on its risk profile.

Strategic intelligence enables the organizations to:

• Identify active and imminent threats and risks to the organization’s industry and brand.
• Determine the cyber risk profile and mitigation actions.
• Prioritize cybersecurity investments and initiatives based on risk to critical components of the organization such as people, processes and technologies.
• Qualify and quantify the cybersecurity risks relevant to the organization.
• Optimize and maintain the organization’s security posture.

Who is the target audience for Strategic Threat Intelligence reports?

Senior leadership, Security Director, C.I.S.O, etc. CYFIRMA’s strategically put together reports should help clarify a clearer picture about cyber risks, the business decisions associated with them, and the implication of these threats to the organization. Armed with this strategic CTI report, business owners can better direct cybersecurity efforts and associated investments to ensure they are in line with the business’s top priorities.

What are the common sources employed by CYFIRMA to source Strategic Threat Intelligence?

• Online sources spread across the surface web and deep/dark web.
• Media, both print and online, locally and nationally.
• Policy documents released by governmental organizations, and specific groups of interest.
• Social media activity involving groups or individuals of interest.
• Free online documents released by security organizations.
• Industry specific publications, etc.

Why source Strategic Threat Intelligence from CYFIRMA?

The greatest limitation when dealing with Strategic Intelligence’s role in CTI is the quantum of available information and how the same can be processed to fit a strategic report. Availability of high-value sources (across the deep/dark web, surface web, etc.) ensures that there will be a tremendous amount of information to examine. Additionally, if the available source is in a foreign language then the resultant insights can be impacted by poor translation.

CYFIRMA employs a mix of cutting-edge technology, analytics and expert personnel to examine lots of such high-value sources in quick time and helps businesses optimize resource allocation and risk-management initiatives by understanding the threat actors most likely to target them. The assimilated insights address such concerns as might be raised by a key decision maker, including, risk scores, cyberattack history of a particular geographical region or industry, and expected outcomes for a specific business action.

Listed below are some case-studies that further establish CYFIRMA’s proficiency as a robust aggregator of Strategic Threat Intelligence.

Case Study 1: CYFIRMA’s Strategic Intelligence offering helped a Japanese Conglomerate finetune its Security Profile

A little while back, CYFIRMA helped a large Japanese corporation with footprint in the heavy industry, financial services, retail, and food and beverage sectors, better understand cyber risks and mitigate them efficiently and effectively. As the standard approach, CYFIRMA helped the organization’s CISO to better understand the cyber threat profile, leading to the updating of cyber governance and policies to incorporate internal risk and breach scenarios.

Case Study 2: CYFIRMA Strategic Insights helped a Large US Financial Institution Refine and Upgrade its Security Strategies

A large US-based financial institution with a sophisticated cyber threat center needed to refine their security policies for a more inclusive and expansive response against ever emerging cyber threats. CYFIRMA helped the organization’s CISO to better plan cyber initiatives and policies, leading to the updating of their cyber strategy with an integrated plan to incorporate Advanced Persistence Threat (APT) and data-loss protection controls.

Additionally, the following highlights CYFIRMA’s strategic recommendations to organizations. These insights help the organizations make the best use of their security assets.

• Plan periodic Red Team exercise to measure the effectiveness of the people, processes, and security technologies used to defend the environment. Red Team exercise helps organizations to improve security controls detection, enhance defensive capabilities, and measure the overall effectiveness existing security operations.
• Perform yearly Cyber Benchmarking exercise to benchmark the security performance against industry peers, measure the impact of risk mitigation efforts, and report security progress and results to Boards of Directors more clearly and effectively.
• Enable emerging security solutions like deception technology powered with machine learning helps in real-time breach detection and prevention.

Curious about what strategic threat intelligence can do for your business?

Stay tuned for our next blog post in this series addressing Management Intelligence.