Conventionally, IT leaders and cybersecurity experts used to invest in cybersecurity tools that would work best in protecting their most valued assets. With the ever-evolving threat landscape that their companies were exposed to, it would be tough to keep attackers from inventing threats that could outsmart the solutions that they had invested in. As a result, IT leaders are forced to look for ways to proactively protect their organization instead of doing it in a reactive manner.
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By gathering enough threat intelligence, this goal can turn into a reality. In fact, 81% of professionals agree that having enough threat intelligence will boost how a business can identify and eliminate cybersecurity threats. However, the effectiveness of your threat intelligence strategy trickles down to the small details of how you plan it.
Here are four ways to improve the success rate of your threat intelligence strategy:
Plan Your Strategy
To best succeed in your threat intelligence strategy, you need to clearly allocate the various duties to your staff. While some will concentrate on monitoring your tail log files using the best logging solutions in the search for anything that might seem amiss, others should concentrate on gathering information outside the scope of your organization.
This will include monitoring the threats that lie both in the open web and on the dark web. Concentrating on the dark web will provide you with information that relying on the open web will only prove to be futile.
Concentrate on Industry Related Attacks
The perfect threat intelligence strategy starts with you being aware of attacks that wreak havoc in your industry. Communicating with other businesses in your industry will help you identify any threat that you might have been blind to. Gathering this information will help you adapt quickly to the threats that affect businesses in your industry while learning from the mistakes of other organizations.
For instance, pretexting might have been rampant in your industry with many employees falling prey to it and other social engineering scams. If you commit to being in communication with other IT leaders, then you will see such scams from miles away. In fact, it becomes quite easier to tackle the threats as you can easily train your employees on how to avoid them.
Vulnerability Prioritization
Not all threat and vulnerabilities promise the same level of damage to your organization. While your threat monitoring tools will showcase a couple of vulnerabilities in your system, some will need to be patched with more urgency than others. As a result, you need to use threat intelligence to come up with a prioritization list for the different threats that your company is exposed to.
For instance, you will need to concentrate on threats that are currently wreaking havoc in your industry before dealing with a simple mistake in coding that could barely cause any harm. In case a threat seems massive, then you can involve the rest of your IT staff to eliminate it as soon as possible.
Commit To Brand Monitoring
Threat intelligence can also help you identify situations where an attack against your brand is being planned by cybercriminals. Other than directly attacking your brand, it is common for attacks such as brand jacking, counterfeiting, and piracy to be used by cybercriminals to harm your reputation. To achieve this, you can monitor your brand’s interaction on the various social media platforms as well as note down any brand mentions.
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Additionally, it will be wise to search your name on the dark web. Finding your company’s name or even contacts mentioned should raise red flags.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity threats will keep on changing as hackers learn new ways to cause more harm to businesses. Only those businesses with adequate threat intelligence can survive this uncertainty. Consider the tips above to be ready for any threat hackers might throw at your business.
