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

Threat actors

Understanding and analyzing the different actor types and their distinct characteristics and motivations play a key role in synthesizing and enriching threat intelligence data. Connecting the dots of who performed an attack, along with the TTPs they leveraged, creates an accurate intelligence profile. Cyber threat actors are the individuals, states, or groups behind an attack. Threat actors act with malicious intent to take advantage of technical vulnerabilities and lack of security awareness to gain unauthorized access to enterprise devices, data systems, or networks.

There are six basic classifications of threat actors that are commonly used in CTI, and while these broad classifications help illustrate the who behind an attack, these threat actor classifications are often mixed. This is because an actor group may comprise mixed motivations and classifications. To fully understand the nature of cyber threat actors, it's important to understand the history of...