How to build an effective threat intelligence program
Discover how building an effective and efficient threat intelligence program can help you elevate your existing security services to the next level. For many security teams, particularly those defending against advanced persistent threats or threat actors, establishing a comprehensive approach to threat detection and incident response is crucial. By integrating real-time threat intelligence feeds into your workflows, you can bolster your intelligence CTI strategy and better anticipate emerging cyber threats.
Across the world, threats are constantly evolving, and business security risks are increasing. In recent years, threats have further intensified, escalating challenges in an already overwhelming and complex security landscape. Alongside profound social instability, failure in governance, and deepening polarization between opposing political and cultural views, organizations must prioritize intelligence operational planning to anticipate potential threat actors and mitigate security risks. This heightened awareness is also vital when analyzing multiple data sources, monitoring advanced persistent threats, and ensuring indicators of compromise in IOC are recognized early in the intelligence lifecycle.
We’ve seen an increase in private security organizations seeking greater situational awareness and operational efficiency as we enter the new normal, and many are looking to intelligence-led approaches as the lifeline that keeps businesses, clients, and assets safe. At the heart of these approaches lies the need for timely threat intelligence data, ongoing threat hunting, and the right intelligence tools to streamline threat detection and accelerate incident response. By focusing on intelligence strategic and intelligence operational objectives, security teams can address increasingly complex security operations requirements.
Why is threat intelligence necessary to private security?
Threat intelligence is more than simply a series of alerts. It includes both tactical intelligence for immediate action and strategic threat intelligence for long-term planning. Understanding the different types of threat intelligence can help private security companies better recognize the full range of cyber threats they face and adopt techniques and procedures to mitigate them.
Of course, being notified of new incidents and evolving situations is an essential part of business threat intelligence, and key to protecting the businesses, people, or assets that you’re responsible for – but an effective threat intelligence program needs more than that. Threat intelligence CTI capabilities, such as feeding intelligence data into advanced analytics dashboards, enable you to detect emerging trends in real-time and derive actionable insights. By focusing on operational intelligence, you can also refine tactics and techniques to improve resilience.
Reliable, actionable, and context-rich intelligence provides you with an understanding of exactly how an incident, trend, or pattern is going to impact your client and their organization, helping you better prepare for and prevent such security risks. This includes synthesizing intelligence feeds from different data sources, prioritizing indicators compromise and facilitating tactical threat intelligence to improve threat detection and incident response readiness.
Unfortunately, security-related decisions are often made without this real insight or understanding. How can you effectively protect your clients if your knowledge of the threat landscape is lacking or inaccurate? Without proper intelligence feeds or operational threat intelligence, critical intelligence data can be overlooked, leaving security teams at risk of missing crucial indicators compromise IOCs.
In simple terms, it’s like removing the blindfold.
A recent quote from one of our clients, King Safety and Security (KSS), on how Intelligence Fusion’s data has enriched their services in the private security industry.
Matt Beer, KSS Company Director, also stated that adapting their executive protection business to an intelligence-led approach has dramatically increased the level of proactive protection they provide to their clients.
An intelligence-led approach to private security begins with understanding your client’s threat profile and the risks that may directly or indirectly target them. Once you are aware of the threats that they face, you can better direct your intelligence collection. Incorporating tactics, techniques, and procedures, while leveraging strategic intelligence insights, will help deliver effective threat intelligence tailored to specific environments, threat actors, and operational needs.
Our process at Intelligence Fusion includes an Intelligence Collection Plan (ICP). During the onboarding process, this session helps us to develop a deep understanding of your operations as well as who or what you’re protecting. By mapping this knowledge to types of threat intelligence, we ensure your security teams have the proper threat detection and threat hunting capabilities in place.
Because we’ve built a fully operational 24/7 intelligence unit, we can quickly adapt and respond to the growing needs of you and your clients. Our intelligence CTI approach incorporates multiple data sources, ensuring your tactical threat intelligence remains robust and up to date.
For example, suppose you’ve recently won a new contract, or perhaps you’re currently working on some proposals to win new business. In that case, you may need us to start collecting intelligence in new areas that weren’t part of your original collection plan. These requests may be temporary or long-term – either way, we’re structured in a way that allows us to quickly and easily react to changing requirements and new business threats. This operational threat intelligence capability ensures real-time coverage of ongoing developments, helping you provide actionable insights and indicators of compromise to your clients.
Do I need to build a threat intelligence program?
Are you responsible for the safety and protection of people or assets?
Whether you’re providing executive protection, risk management, travel risk management, or emergency response, having access to a continuous stream of data will vastly improve your understanding of the threat landscape. By integrating threat intelligence platforms and harnessing tactical intelligence, you can anticipate advanced persistent threats and gain a clearer picture of potential risk scenarios.
Being more informed and having immediate access to the latest intelligence will enable you to advise your clients better, regardless of their requirements. Using intelligence tools and threat intelligence data will enhance security operations by guiding security teams towards the most pressing threats.
Do you have an international footprint?
If you have clients traveling across the globe, you’ll need a constant awareness of what’s happening in those places. Building a threat intelligence program can give you exactly that. By utilizing strategic threat intelligence, you can develop a comprehensive picture of emerging cyber threats and physical security challenges worldwide, aided by intelligence feeds filled with relevant threat data.
The needs of travel security companies are complex – in addition to the physical threats your clients might face, there’s a need to understand the geopolitics of each region, as well as any government changes or developments that may affect movement or the way your business can operate within the country. Data sources that offer real-time updates and analysis of threat actors significantly reduce uncertainty.
Do you work in a saturated market?
If you operate in a competitive space, a threat intelligence unit can take your services to the next level and give you the edge you need to acquire and retain your client base. By showing your clients how you integrate threat hunting tactics, threat intelligence lifecycle principles, and operational threat intelligence outputs, you display a deep capability to safeguard their interests.
You can provide elevated situational awareness, perfect for pre-travel, route, and risk assessments, country or regional reports, as well as being useful for live-monitoring of a place or area during travel or client movement, too. Incorporating threat intelligence feeds and intelligence CTI can ensure these reports remain current and accurate.
Having a database of intelligence can also help you to justify your services by highlighting the various risks to your client and demonstrating the potential of threats to escalate. Ensuring the intelligence lifecycle is followed, from direction to collection and dissemination, guarantees consistency and quality in every assessment.
Answering yes to any of the above questions means that your business operations would benefit from the development of a threat intelligence unit, whether internal or outsourced. Such a unit would integrate intelligence data, threat detection capabilities, and operational intelligence best practices to support continued growth and client confidence.
How to build an effective threat intelligence program
A well-built threat intelligence program will provide a valuable and precise insight into the global security landscape – helping you to:
- Understand past and current threats, as well as help forecast future ones
- Contextualize potential threats
- Quickly triage and process incoming information
- Prioritize and allocate your resources more efficiently
- Improve your team’s performance
- Save time, money, and in some cases, lives
So, how to go about building a threat intelligence program – and what do you need to make sure it’s effective? Incorporating operational threat intelligence and focusing on indicators, compromise IOC, tactics, techniques, procedures, and intelligence strategic planning are some of the critical elements.
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Creating an intelligence team
Highly-trained intelligence analysts with appropriate technologies and collection methods are critical to a successful threat intelligence program. Their expertise enables you to identify and respond to cyber threats quickly, thereby improving incident response times and enhancing the efficiency of security operations.
A conscious effort should be made to build a team of threat intelligence analysts with diverse skills and analytical expertise. Analysts may be specialists in a variety of domains due to their experience, education, or location, and having a good blend of interests and capabilities is recommended. Diversity in approach helps uncover advanced persistent threats and threat actors who may employ sophisticated tactics and techniques.
Our analyst team at Intelligence Fusion comprises a diverse range of backgrounds, careers, and experiences. Every intelligence analyst is a graduate of our military-standard intelligence training program, ensuring consistency and maintaining high standards across our collection and reporting. This training covers types of threat intelligence, data source management, and real-time analysis for both tactical and strategic threat intelligence.
The intelligence training consists of a diverse range of modules, all built using real-life experiences, case studies, and examples from our intelligence teams’ previous careers spanning multiple countries and sectors. These useful hooks of knowledge and tangible scenarios help trainees to absorb and retain information. They also foster a deeper understanding of how intelligence tools and threat intelligence platforms can be leveraged for critical analysis and dissemination.
Training should be provided to everyone working within your threat intelligence unit, including senior management, to ensure clear standards and cognizance across the department. Aligning them with intelligence lifecycle best practices – from collection to dissemination – enhances the effectiveness of your overall threat intelligence CTI approach.
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Setting standards
Written procedures are also key to maintaining quality within your threat intelligence program. Your analyst team should follow a defined methodology of direction, collection, processing, evaluation, and dissemination – also known as the Intelligence Cycle. This structure ensures that security teams have a clear plan for how to encounter threat actors, gather intelligence data, and incorporate actionable insights into decision-making.
Due to the vast amount of data available, the intelligence cycle provides an order to the collection and information gathering process. It states exactly what needs to be collected, in what priority, and when. Following this framework ensures your intelligence operational methods are both efficient and effective.
Timely, accurate, and actionable intelligence requires a formal yet flexible process based on sound principles. The intelligence lifecycle is a proven methodology used for planning and decision-making across various military forces worldwide. This approach can support operational threat intelligence by ensuring that intelligence feeds are appropriately vetted and that indicators that compromise IOC are tracked consistently.
With a history of working in military intelligence here at IF, the implementation of the Intelligence Cycle and other military doctrine provides structure, consistency, and ensures high standards across our team. Most importantly, however, it helps us focus our collection efforts to meet best the needs of our clients and the people they protect. Tying all these steps together improves threat detection and fosters more effective threat intelligence overall.
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Building your source list
Intelligence Collection is the most time-consuming element of the cycle, especially if you have multiple clients with multiple requirements. Gathering intelligence data from diverse data sources is pivotal in uncovering threat actors, advanced persistent threats, or potential cyber threats lurking in the environment.
Our clients providing security consultancy have previously spent days gathering enough historical data to make sure their assessments and reports were as comprehensive as possible – a time-consuming and resource-intensive task that meant client briefs couldn’t be planned and conducted at speed. To streamline this, you may integrate threat intelligence tools or threat intelligence platforms that can draw in multiple intelligence feeds for more efficient analysis.
Creating a reliable source list that provides accurate and up-to-date information will save you time and money, allowing for a much shorter turnaround time when responding to clients’ requests and last-minute travel arrangements. This ensures that you don’t miss crucial indicators that can compromise the outcome of a security operation.
The team at Intelligence Fusion has spent years building and refining an extensive source list of over 12,500 individual references that we use to identify information, before analyzing and disseminating it to clients quickly. This robust approach to data sources helps refine both tactical threat intelligence and strategic threat intelligence, improving decision-making in real time.
And because we have a broad spectrum of skills and expertise within our 24/7 Operations Centre, we’re able to meet the needs of clients across multiple industries too. This operational threat approach, coupled with comprehensive techniques and procedures, ensures we can respond to threat hunting requirements and address the full spectrum of cyber threats.
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Managing your data
From understanding the historical landscape of a region to precisely geolocating incidents, building a library of reliable open source tools and technologies will help your threat intelligence team cut through the online chaos and manage your data collection efforts efficiently. Adopting intelligence tools that align with the intelligence lifecycle is essential for effective data gathering, especially when dealing with a vast range of potential threat actors and advanced persistent threats.
As your source list grows and your database of incidents expands, being able to access historical intelligence quickly will also save time during future assignments. Knowing you can tap into your entire back catalogue of data will also ensure that there’s never any duplication of effort from your team, re-collecting data that’s already available in your archives. This consolidated threat intelligence data can be shared seamlessly across security teams, supporting immediate incident response or longer-term strategic intelligence projects.
It’s also vital that intelligence is visualized in a way that provides clarity and context, helping you to understand what’s really happening and why it matters to your client. Visualizing operational intelligence in a user-friendly platform can improve security operations by allowing for quick spotting of patterns, threat detection, and timely threat hunting.
This is why we emphasize the way incident data looks within our threat intelligence platform. We’ve designed and developed an award-winning user interface with powerful visualization tools that are vital to helping our clients digest information at speed. Effective data visualization reduces complexity when dealing with indicators, compromise IOCs, or advanced intelligence CTI tasks.
There are also extensive filtering options that allow users to deep-dive into over 1,200,000 incidents worldwide. So, researching and understanding new environments has never been easier. This functionality provides critical, actionable insights and supports a more agile approach to tactics, techniques, and procedures, ultimately enabling an even more effective threat intelligence program for our clients.
If you need to assess your intelligence efforts, or want to improve them, contact us today to learn how Sigma7 can help.
