Study Guide: Introduction To Cyber Threat Intelligence
Study Guide: Introduction To Cyber Threat Intelligence
Study Guide
Introduction to Cyber Threat Intelligence
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○ Starting in the 1990s, all military activity was starting to move to the cyber realm.
○ Starting in the 2000s, Cyber Threat Intelligence was born.
● What comes next for Cyber Threat Intelligence?
○ In the next decade, Cyber Threat Intelligence continues to grow with the help of
two powerful tools:
■ Artificial Intelligence (AI)
■ Machine Learning
○ These subjects would help organizations to lower its cost and resource
requirements, allowing any type of organization (even small ones) to obtain all
the benefits of Cyber Threat Intelligence.
● Post-Assessment Question (will discuss these topics further in future lessons)
○ Why do you think this approach has been so important all this time?
○ If the roots of Cyber Threat Intelligence go back to military usage and war
approaches, does it mean we are at war?
○ How does the original military approach map to current Cybersecurity structure in
most organizations?
● Video Summary
○ All organizations regardless of size, industry, or geography will have threats to
their infrastructure, assets, and people.
○ Data is available from a variety of sources and the mechanisms to consume it
and give context are becoming more available with time.
○ The collection and interpretation of this data to drive an action is the essence of
intelligence.
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● Risk Analysis
○ Where is all my risk?
○ How can Cyber Threat Intelligence influence the risk posture of an organization?
○ Could the mere existence of Cyber Threat Intelligence in an organization lower
it’s risk?
○ All of the information obtained from Cyber Threat Intelligence increases the
chances and capability to defend yourself and decreases your overall risk.
○ RSA defines cyber risk as “the potential of loss or harm related to technical
infrastructure or the use of technology within an organization” (RSA, 2019)
● CTI is everywhere...right?
○ In every area we were able to identify the role of CTI in order to improve security
posture.
○ Data is everywhere, information can help every organizational unit, intelligence
can drive the right questions to the right answers.
○ Every single process in an organization can benefit from CTI with the right
implementation and the right organization nature.
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○ What processes must be manual in order to guarantee the right context to the
information collected?
■ Any process requiring analysis should be manual
● Video Summary
○ In today’s lecture, we discussed:
■ Where the collection of information can be obtained from
■ How these sources may present a challenge for the organization
■ What techniques should be used to gather information for these sources
■ What risks exist in some of these information sources
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● VIdeo Summary
○ In today’s video we dove into the SOC challenges and how the Cyber Threat
Intelligence unit can help to ease these.
■ The overwhelming amount of alerts
■ The key processes to guarantee an effective monitoring
■ The alerts enrichment to provide a more efficient use of their time
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○ What are the specific roles that SOC analysts have to execute in order to fulfill
their purpose?
● Video Summary
○ The overwhelming amount of alerts that SOC analysts have to go through
○ The key processes that have to assure to guarantee effective monitoring
○ The alerts enrichment in order to provide the necessary context to the analysts
○ Each one of these steps requires high reactive response and most of the time it
is not done until an alert is flagged
● How can we reduce the “reactiveness” issue?
○ Two areas have been identified, that with the right preparation can be especially
helpful in reducing response times by becoming less reactive. Those are:
■ Identification of probable threats
■ Prioritization
● Incident Response + Cyber Threat Intelligence
○ Automatically identifying and dismissing false positive alerts
○ Enriching alerts with real-time context from across the open and dark web
○ Assembling and comparing information from internal and external data sources
○ Scoring threats according to the organization’s specific needs and infrastructure
● Video Summary
○ Incident Response teams have just as demanding of a job as the SOC team
when talking about alerts.
○ Cyber Threat Intelligence aids the Incident Response team by providing
Identification of threats and prioritization.
○ Providing details about the threat and insights about the attacker TTPs
(Recorded Future, 2018)
● Remediate data exposure and stolen assets
○ Organizations take an average of 196 days to detect a breach
○ Stolen data and proprietary assets often turn up for sale on the Dark Web.
○ Cyber Threat Intelligence could be capable of alerting when:
■ The organization’s assets are exposed online
■ Someone is offering these assets for sale
● Half measures are worse than nothing
○ A minimum intelligence implementation will often leave aside critical analysis in
order to get real intelligence from information sources.
○ The lack of a complete analysis of information will leave the task to be performed
by security analysts at the moment of an incident when timing is crucial.
● Video Summary
○ In today’s lecture:
■ We identified multiple real life cases where CTI can help by:
● Prepare processes in advance
● Defining scopes and containing incidents
● Remediate data exposure and stolen assets
■ How half CTI is not better than none
● Relevant
○ There are two categories of false positives to consider:
■ Alerts that are relevant to an organization but are inaccurate or unhelpful
■ Alerts that are accurate and/or interesting but aren’t relevant to the
organization
● Contextualized
○ Corroboration from multiple sources associated with recent attacks
○ Confirmation that it has been associated with threat actors active in industry
○ A timeline showing that the alert occurred before or after other events linked with
attacks
● Integrated
○ CTI can help the Incident Response team to:
■ Determine whether each alert should be dismissed as a false positive
■ Score the alert according to its importance
■ Enrich the alert with valuable extra content
● Post Assessment Question
○ How does the CTI process help with Incident Response timing?
■ It’s all about context
○ What aspects of Incident Response does CTI provide enrichment for?
○ How could a breach be identified through a CTI unit?
■ Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applied to solutions is an
important ally with discussing threats and alerts
● Video Summary
○ We identified multiple real life cases
■ Mapped them out with how CTI capabilities could help each one of them
○ We can identify the essential characteristics that CTI provides to the information
used in Incident Response
■ Threat probabilities and costs are based on partial information and riddled
with unfounded assumptions.
● FAIR Risk Framework
○ Keys of the FAIR framework
■ This framework enables organizations to create more efficient risk models
by:
● Making defined measurements of risk
● Transparent about assumptions, variables, and outcomes
● Show specific loss probabilities in financial terms
● Threat Intelligence and Threat Probabilities
○ A big part of creating a threat model involves estimating the probability of
successful attacks. To do so, Cyber Threat Intelligence can:
■ Create a list of threat categories that might affect the business
■ Estimate probabilities that the attacks will happen, and that they will
succeed
● Cost of attacks fed by CTI
○ Cost of similar attacks on enterprises of the same size and in the same industry
○ Systems that need to be remediated after an attack, and the type of remediation
they required
● So, how does Risk Analysis benefit from CTI?
○ How do Risk Assessments measure risks? Is that accurate?
○ What sort of information does CTI provide to Risk Analysis in order to make it
more effective?
○ Would you choose an approach with or without CTI?
● Video Summary
○ In today’s lecture, we discussed:
■ How risk models are often used in organizations
■ What specific areas can CTI enhance in order to obtain a more accurate
risk calculation
■ What processes considered in CTI benefit Risk Analysis
■ The type of intelligence that Risk Analysis needs
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○ In its most basic form, this model describes that an adversary deploys a
capability over some infrastructure against a victim.
● Pivoting
○ “The Diamond Model would help you “pivot” from this initial indicator to find
information about the attacker associated with that IP address, then research the
known capabilities of that attacker” (Recorded Future, 2018)
● Diamond Event
○ “For every intrusion event there exists an adversary taking a step towards an
intended goal by using a capability over infrastructure against a victim to produce
a result” (Sergio Caltagirone, 2013)
○ Each event feature has an associated confidence value. This value is left
purposefully undefined as each model implementation may understand
confidence differently.
● Flexibility
○ One of the big advantages of the Diamond Model is its flexibility and extensibility.
Other features of an attack that can be tracked include:
■ Phase
■ Result
■ Direction
■ Methodology
■ Resources
● Video Summary
○ In today’s lecture, we discussed:
■ The Diamond Model used for CTI
■ How is the information distributed in this model.
○ In the next video, we will study:
■ The roles of each one of the different events involved
■ The challenges that an implementation of this model may bring.
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● Video Summary
○ Review of what we have gone through so far:
■ Building a team for Cyber Threat Intelligence
■ Core competencies for the best profiles performing Cyber Threat
Intelligence operators.
■ Four types of Cyber Threat Intelligence and how they can be applied.
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Module 8: Conclusion
Lesson 8.1: Key Takeaways
Skills Learned From This Lesson: Cyber Threat Intelligence, Focus on Relevant Risk, Efficient
Security, Value of Data Feeds
● Cyber Threat Intelligence is for everyone!
○ Cyber Threat Intelligence enables teams to:
■ Anticipate threats
■ Respond to attacks faster
■ Make better decisions for risk reduction
● A focus on relevant risk
○ There is no such thing as “one hundred percent secure”
○ The identification and response to threats should be relevant as much as
possible.
○ The more relevant intelligence, the more effective would be the risk reduction at
your organization.
● Efficiency is key when talking about security
○ Integration of Cyber Threat Intelligence with other security teams help them
identify threats earlier.
○ Identifying threats earlier will guarantee a faster incident resolution.
○ Efficiency reducing risk is the ultimate goal of an organization
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competency analytics.
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cybersecurity industry. Enterprise-grade workforce development
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competency analytics.
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