Technological advancements have revolutionized the world’s cultural and economic institutions in almost every aspect. Unfortunately, they have also brought risks in the form of cyber threats. While there are various ways to mitigate such threats, paying importance to threat intelligence can make a difference to your organization.
What Is Threat Intelligence?
Threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge that allows organizations to mitigate or prevent cyber-attacks. It provides context, implications, indicators, and mechanisms you can use to make well-informed decisions about your company’s security.
Organizations can access this information through ‘threat feeds,’ which provide detection updates. These feeds can be community-based, vendor-based, or public-based. They can also be maintained and generated internally in a proprietary fashion.
Threat intelligence and other cyber security services in Toronto not only help prevent cyber threats but also help in recovering from the damages in case of attacks. If you’re in doubt about threat intelligence, here are the reasons it matters to your organization:
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It Helps Prevent Financial Loss
Security breaches can be expensive. More often than not, they can include investigations, lawsuits, and fines that cost millions of dollars. With threat intelligence, you can help your incident response team to make informed and timely decisions to prevent downtime, protect your assets, save your company’s customers and reputation, and avoid data theft.
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It Helps Gather Actionable Data
Threat intelligence helps gather actionable data for your business and provides insights about cyber-attack indicators. Such threat indicators include email addresses, servers, and web addresses used in cyber-attacks.
All these can be scanned and actionable for your infrastructure, enabling you to develop cybersecurity best practices. Together with your incident response teams, the gathered actionable data can strengthen your defenses, preventing the likelihood of cyber-attacks.
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It Maximizes Staffing Efficiency
Threat intelligence makes your security team less prone to burnout due to alert fatigue, allowing them to be more efficient. Manually correlating and validating threat intelligence is resource-intensive and time-consuming.
Leveraging threat intelligence solutions that use security automation and artificial intelligence can help your business correlate and collect data about threats. This way, you can lessen your security response times and minimize false positives to let your security teams focus on what matters.
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It Reduces Loss Of Data
Since threat intelligence can help block malicious domains and website addresses belonging to cyber criminals, it can prevent threats from penetrating your infrastructure. As a result, attackers won’t be able to steal your sensitive data, improving your data security and minimizing the chances of data loss.
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It Secures Network Infrastructure
When cybercriminals find an entry point in your infrastructure, they may crawl through your entire system, using siphoning and lateral movement for financial or sensitive data. Threat intelligence can help scan for compromise indicators and block them in your infrastructure. This way, you can immediately secure your network’s infrastructure and prevent threats from proceeding if they have entered your system.
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It Helps Your Business Maintain Pace With The Constantly Evolving Attacks
Another reason threat intelligence matters to an organization are that it helps your business maintain pace with the constantly evolving attacks. For example, many attacks these days occur through phishing emails.
Threat intelligence can be used to close any entry point for attackers. In the case of phishing, businesses can have various employee awareness programs to block possible cyber-attacks.
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It Evaluates Your Organization’s Security Posture
Threat intelligence can help assess your infrastructure’s security posture. It provides data on exploiting vulnerabilities found in different applications, software, and tools.
With threat intelligence, you can constantly check on what new vulnerabilities are exploited or discovered and check which assets are at risk. As a result, you can apply timely updates or patches to your critical assets as soon as cybersecurity specialists fix any bugs or vulnerabilities.
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It Provides In-Depth Cyber Threat Analysis
Threat intelligence provides you with an in-depth analysis of all cyber threats. Therefore, it can help your organization analyze the different methods attackers can use. If your current cybersecurity defense strategy can’t protect your network, you can improve your network’s security with threat intelligence. Doing so can help protect your system from possible vulnerabilities.
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It Offers Collaborative Knowledge
Threat intelligence offers collaborative knowledge that may benefit your entire organization. It shares essential cybersecurity information and practices that your employees may not be aware of. Since it’s somewhat challenging to keep up with zero-day threats or new vulnerabilities, threat intelligence can be advantageous for your organization, allowing you to defend yourself against cyber threats and get ahead of the attackers.
Conclusion
Those are many reasons threat intelligence is essential for any organization. It not only enhances your organization’s security posture but also alerts you about possible threats coming your way. With such insights, you can strengthen your cybersecurity technique, effectively mitigating cyber-attacks.
