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

Malware, campaigns, and actor naming

What's in a name? In the cybersecurity community, a lot. While there is seemingly an endless number of bears, lotuses, spiders, and octopi, these names aren't arbitrary. Most often, these names that are employed by companies across the globe are nicknames associated with clustered attributes about the groups behind malicious activities.

The act of naming

The act of naming threat actors is done by vendors throughout the security community, such as FireEye, Dell Secureworks, Palo Alto Networks, Crowdstrike, or Symantec. Some companies use animals or insects, while others use numbers, but one thing is for certain: it's confusing.

Names are often derived based on technical and operational groups of activity, such as a grouping of malicious macro-embedded decoy documents with the same author and payload. Operational groupings can occur when there is a similarity in operational work, such as sharing a C2 infrastructure among a...