FAQ

What Is Threat Intelligence in Cybersecurity?

Digital technologies lie at the heart of nearly every industry today. The automation and greater connectedness they afford have revolutionized the world’s economic and cultural institutions — but they’ve also brought risk in the form of cyberattacks. Threat intelligence, often synonymous with open source intelligence (OSINT) is knowledge that allows you to prevent or mitigate those attacks. Rooted in data, threat intelligence provides context — like who is attacking you, what their motivation and capabilities are, and what indicators of compromise in your systems to look for — that helps you make informed decisions about your security.

“Threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and action-oriented advice about an existing or emerging menace or hazard to assets. This intelligence can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject’s response to that menace or hazard.” — Gartner

Endpoint detection and response (EDR), also known as endpoint threat detection and response (ETDR), is an integrated endpoint security solution that combines real-

time continuous monitoring and collection of endpoint data with rules-based automated response and analysis capabilities. The term was suggested by Anton Chuvakin at Gartner to describe emerging security systems that detect and investigate suspicious activities on hosts and endpoints, employing a high degree of automation to enable security teams to quickly identify and respond to threats.

The primary functions of an EDR security system are to:

• Monitor and collect activity data from endpoints that could indicate a threat
• Analyze this data to identify threat patterns
• Automatically respond to identified threats to remove or contain them, and notify security personnel
• Forensics and analysis tools to research identified threats and search for suspicious activities

Extended detection and response, often abbreviated (XDR), is a SaaS tool that offers holistic, optimized security by integrating security products and data into simplified solutions. As enterprises increasingly encounter an evolving threat landscape and complex security challenges with workforces in multi-cloud, hybrid environments, XDR security presents a more efficient, proactive solution. In contrast to systems like endpoint detection and response (EDR), XDR broadens the scope of security, integrating protection across a wider range of products, including an organization’s endpoints, servers, cloud applications, emails, and more. From there, XDR combines prevention, detection, investigation, and response, providing visibility, analytics, correlated incident alerts, and automated responses to improve data security and combat threats.

Key capabilities of XDR

Correlated incidents
XDR collects and correlates alerts, creating a more complete picture of a security incident or attack, and allowing analysts to invest time in more focused research.

Analytics
Because XDR systems examine large swathes of data coming in from multiple sources—identities, endpoints, email, data, networks, storage, Internet of Things, and applications—strong analytics are essential to understanding threat activity. XDR’s robust analytics allow for threat timeline visibility and help analysts more easily find threats that might otherwise go undetected.

Automated detection and response
XDR automatically identifies, assesses, and remediates known threats in real-time, reducing and simplifying an organization’s workload, and catching hard-to-detect threats.

AI and machine learning
XDR applies AI and machine learning, creating scalability and efficiency. From behavior detection and alerts to investigation and remediation, an XDR uses AI to monitor threatening behavior and automatically respond and mitigate possible attacks. With machine learning, XDR can create profiles of suspicious behavior, flagging them for analyst review.

Auto-healing of affected assets
XDR returns affected assets to a safe state by enacting healing actions like terminating malicious processes, removing malicious forwarding rules, and identifying compromised users in an organization’s directory.

If you were the mayor of a major city, what would you value more? Police cars that can identify issues in traffic and prevent accidents, or ambulances that can race to the scene of an accident, respond to a crisis and save lives?

Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) help prevent security threats, including known and unknown malware, on your endpoint devices. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions help you detect and respond to incidents that managed to bypass your EPP or other security measures. Which is more important? Can you do without one or the other?

Many modern EPP platforms combine the two approaches, offering both threat prevention and EDR. Still, you can choose which components to deploy on which endpoints and there may be separate pricing for different parts of the EPP package. So the question of prevention vs. response is still a relevant one.

4 Reasons Why Penetration Testing Is Important

Penetration testing, also called ethical hacking, white-hat hacking, or pentesting, is a form of security assessment that tests a computer system, network, or software application to find security vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. The scope of penetration testing can vary depending on our requirements. It could range from a simple single web application penetration test to a full-scale penetration test on the company, also known as Red-Teaming or Adversarial Simulation.

Here are four reasons why businesses should consider conducting a penetration test on themselves:

1. Risk Assessment

How much is your business worth today? How crucial to your business is your IT infrastructure? How much would it cost if that IT infrastructure is disrupted for a day? Basically, this thought exercise is a risk assessment of your business. It uncovers the risk you are exposed to and its impacts. Depending on the likelihood and impact of the threats, penetration testing can be one of the top priority objectives.

2. Regulations and Compliance

During the risk assessment, you will assess the impact of not complying to certain laws and regulations if you do not perform a penetration test on your products. Non-compliance to regulations may cost you a hefty fine, lose you your license to operate, or even worse, get you jail time. It is important that you seek legal counsel to assess local laws and regulations and ensure that your company complies with those regulations.

3. Reputation

Your company’s reputation will definitely suffer when a data breach occurs and it is publicly announced. This may cause a loss of customer confidence and lead to a drop in revenue and profit. Your company’s share price will also be affected as the investors may worry about the above impact. As people get to understand about data privacy and how it affects them, the impact of a data breach will increase tremendously that could cause significant loss to the company.

4. Competition and Rivalry

Losing your company’s proprietary data will be disastrous, especially if this data is in the hands of your rival companies. While your competitors may not be the one to perform cyber attacks on you, they could acquire this data indirectly.

Cybersecurity risk assessments help organizations understand, control, and mitigate all forms of cyber risk. It is a critical component of risk management strategy and data protection efforts.

Risk assessments are nothing new and whether you like it or not, if you work in information security, you are in the risk management business. As organizations rely more on information technology and information systems to do business, the digital risk threat landscape expands, exposing ecosystems to new critical vulnerabilities.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a Cybersecurity Framework to provide a base for risk assessment practices.

What is Cyber Risk?

Cyber risk is the likelihood of suffering negative disruptions to sensitive data, finances, or business operations online. Most commonly, cyber risks are associated with events that could result in a data breach.

Cyber risks are sometimes referred to as security threats. Examples of cyber risks include:

• Ransomware
• Data leaks
• Phishing
• Malware
• Insider threats
• Cyberattacks

There are practical strategies that you can take to reduce your cybersecurity risk.

Though commonly used interchangeably, cyber risks and vulnerabilities are not the same. A vulnerability is a weakness that results in unauthorized network access when exploited, and a cyber risk is the probability of a vulnerability being exploited.

Digital Risk Protection (DRP) safeguards digital assets. As more business operations embrace digital practices, the threats and attack surfaces that can be exploited by cybercriminals increase. Each organization is unique, but DRP can use the insights derived from Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) monitoring to highlight actionable and specific protections for all.

DRP solutions are not merely a database of intelligence information. DRP platforms use intelligent algorithms plus multiple reconnaissance methods to find, track, and analyze threats in real time. Using both indicators of compromise (IOCs) and indicators of attack (IOAs) intelligence, a DRP solution can analyze risks and warn security teams of potential or imminent attacks.

The data handling and analysis capabilities of DRP systems prevent security teams from being overwhelmed by intelligence data and therefore overlooking a relevant threat. DRP solutions can feed into automated response solutions. They can continuously find, monitor, and mitigate risks that target an organization’s digital assets in real time.

Make zero trust progress while optimizing the digital experience. Zero trust enables secure access for users and devices and within apps, across networks, and clouds. Embed zero trust across the fabric of your multi-environment IT by securing access in a way that frustrates attackers, not users.

The value of zero trust security