Threat intelligence is a critical element of any serious security strategy, but few security teams have the expertise or resources to tackle all the threats they face. Managed Intelligence providers fill a crucial gap by combining people, processes, and technology to deliver threat intelligence-as-a-service. A managed intelligence provider allows organizations to offload resource-intensive threat intelligence tasks to an experienced partner provider.
There are a number of things a managed intel provider should do for you.
Generate intelligence specific to your organization
The purpose of intelligence is to help inform a decision or action. Threat intelligence best helps protect your organization when it provides full context about what the threat means to your organization. It should be paired with specific recommendations about how you avert or shut down the threat and prevent it from happening again. Without these elements, intelligence is not actionable, nor is it truly intelligence. It is only data, or at best, information (i.e., organized data).
While collecting data is an essential first step in the threat intelligence lifecycle, there's a long way to go before the data is transformed into finished intelligence. A managed intelligence provider who only provides information about general threats, trends, or organizations similar to yours doesn’t deliver real, complete answers. You will still need the expertise within your teams to understand what threats matter most to you and what you should do about them.
Deliver analyst-led finished intelligence with access to the analysts
While technology can accelerate the efficiency of achieving immediately useful finished intelligence, intelligence analysts are critical in analyzing and correlating the information and providing insights and guidance based on real-life experience.
Your managed intel provider should provide direct, unlimited access to the analyst who performed the research and analysis and developed your intelligence reports. This ensures that you fully understand the intelligence, and have full confidence about how to mitigate threats and reduce your risk. Ask how much access you will have to your analyst team. Then ask how much the access will cost.
Utilize multi-source collection and analysis capabilities
Getting the coverage you need to ensure a holistic view of your organization’s threats requires multiple, disparate threat sources. While many intel providers are skillful at collecting data on social media and the surface web, it takes an extraordinary breadth and depth of intelligence expertise and experience to navigate the dark web, deep web forums and closed groups.
The most powerful and effective threat intelligence is often the result of correlation of data across multiple domains and data sources. If your managed intelligence provider doesn’t have a team of experienced analysts and an intelligence workbench that covers all data sources, you won’t be getting the full threat visibility and insights you need to effectively protect your organization.
Leverage multilingual data sources and analysis
Given the digital realm transcends borders, threat actors could operate from anywhere and their activities and transactions criss-cross the globe. Researching threats, collecting data, and navigating the worlds where threat actors lurk requires robust linguistics skills, regional expertise, and cultural IQ and EQ. In our truly global threat landscape, managed intel analyst teams must be fluent across data sources and continents. Is yours?
Discover and understand the adversarial mindset
Intel analysts’ expertise should extend beyond IOCs and TTPs. Understanding the adversaries’ motivation and uncovering their intended outcome enables you to proactively prevent threats from impacting your organization. Teams with experience with fraud and e-crime business models, and the ability to seamlessly access these marketplaces and forums provide the peace of mind that if your company’s information is present in these places, it will be swiftly identified, and the threat actors rooted out.
Attribute and unmask adversaries based on relevance and need
Knowing who is behind a threat is sometimes the best or only manner to deter or stop malicious activity. Attribution and unmasking can be necessary to stop an insider threat, receive cyber insurance restitution, implement effective preventative controls, or pursue legal action. Attribution and unmasking is a specialist capability. You don’t want to find out during an incident that your managed threat intelligence provider team doesn’t have this skillset.
Provide intel advice and threat actor engagement guidance
A managed services partner should operate as an extension of your team and provide intelligence advice based upon real-life experiences. Intel analysts that have been in the trenches - in the intelligence community and enterprises - have a deep understanding of not only the adversary, but also the technology, ways of working, and challenges of organizations like yours. They know what needs to be done to stay one step ahead of threat actors, and how to effectively implement these measures.
A managed intelligence provider can take your security program to the next level. Asking the tough questions and being diligent in your search will result in a top-caliber team whose mission is your mission - to keep your organization safe.