Book Image

Operationalizing Threat Intelligence

By : Kyle Wilhoit, Joseph Opacki
Book Image

Operationalizing Threat Intelligence

By: Kyle Wilhoit, Joseph Opacki

Overview of this book

We’re living in an era where cyber threat intelligence is becoming more important. Cyber threat intelligence routinely informs tactical and strategic decision-making throughout organizational operations. However, finding the right resources on the fundamentals of operationalizing a threat intelligence function can be challenging, and that’s where this book helps. In Operationalizing Threat Intelligence, you’ll explore cyber threat intelligence in five fundamental areas: defining threat intelligence, developing threat intelligence, collecting threat intelligence, enrichment and analysis, and finally production of threat intelligence. You’ll start by finding out what threat intelligence is and where it can be applied. Next, you’ll discover techniques for performing cyber threat intelligence collection and analysis using open source tools. The book also examines commonly used frameworks and policies as well as fundamental operational security concepts. Later, you’ll focus on enriching and analyzing threat intelligence through pivoting and threat hunting. Finally, you’ll examine detailed mechanisms for the production of intelligence. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the right tools and understand what it takes to operationalize your own threat intelligence function, from collection to production.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: What Is Threat Intelligence?
6
Section 2: How to Collect Threat Intelligence
12
Section 3: What to Do with Threat Intelligence

Hashing and fingerprinting tools

We wanted to wrap up the last section of this chapter by talking about hashing and fingerprinting tools that are widely used for similarity analysis. The core difference between using the grouping techniques we talked about earlier in this chapter and those in this section is that hashing and fingerprinting tools are typically executed on files or unique artifacts. These are then used to determine the similarity between the files or data that's being analyzed. The methods we have talked about so far have all pivoted off artifacts and indicators of malware and infrastructure. Let's discuss the first tool concept – import hashing.

Import hashing

Import hashing (imphashing) is a technique in which hash values are created and calculated based on the library or imported function names and their order within the executable. Simply put, imphashing is where you compute a hash of the Import Address Table (IAT). We first introduced you...