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

The collection operations life cycle

To be an effective organization that is collecting data that fulfills your intelligence-gathering needs, appropriate planning is needed with special consideration around the established collection priorities, any special RFIs, and administration of collection operations on a recurring basis. Start your operations planning by evaluating any collection metrics that may have been derived about your existing collection effectiveness first. We will be covering collection metrics in more detail later in the chapter. It's important to understand that operations planning is a cyclical process like the intelligence life cycle. You can visualize the collection operations life cycle in Figure 6.2:

Figure 6.2 – Collection operations life cycle

A review of your team's effectiveness will help identify any areas in which more investment is needed into resources and allow you to understand the weaknesses in your collection...