Book Image

Mastering Cyber Intelligence

By : Jean Nestor M. Dahj
Book Image

Mastering Cyber Intelligence

By: Jean Nestor M. Dahj

Overview of this book

The sophistication of cyber threats, such as ransomware, advanced phishing campaigns, zero-day vulnerability attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APTs), is pushing organizations and individuals to change strategies for reliable system protection. Cyber Threat Intelligence converts threat information into evidence-based intelligence that uncovers adversaries' intents, motives, and capabilities for effective defense against all kinds of threats. This book thoroughly covers the concepts and practices required to develop and drive threat intelligence programs, detailing the tasks involved in each step of the CTI lifecycle. You'll be able to plan a threat intelligence program by understanding and collecting the requirements, setting up the team, and exploring the intelligence frameworks. You'll also learn how and from where to collect intelligence data for your program, considering your organization level. With the help of practical examples, this book will help you get to grips with threat data processing and analysis. And finally, you'll be well-versed with writing tactical, technical, and strategic intelligence reports and sharing them with the community. By the end of this book, you'll have acquired the knowledge and skills required to drive threat intelligence operations from planning to dissemination phases, protect your organization, and help in critical defense decisions.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Cyber Threat Intelligence Life Cycle, Requirements, and Tradecraft
7
Section 2: Cyber Threat Analytical Modeling and Defensive Mechanisms
13
Section 3: Integrating Cyber Threat Intelligence Strategy to Business processes

Defining the right sources for threat intelligence

Selecting the data source is part of the data collection phase of CTI. Hence, it is a crucial step in using intelligence for security enhancement. Organizations that possess a basic security defense system manage to collect network traffic, logs, and any other activities that happen in the system. This data is a good source of intelligence. However, most companies look at external sources to enrich the Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) or SIEM to produce reliable threat intelligence results. There are two main categories of threat data sources: internal and external. Let's discuss the difference between the two.

Internal threat intelligence sources

Internal sources include all data coming from within internal systems. These sources include network logs (network element logs such as firewalls, IDSes, IPSes, proxy servers, application servers, and more), user logs, application logs, internal malware analysis, historical cyber...