Page 85 - Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2024

• Software that enables them to gather intelligence on threat actors – to facilitate understanding of
who the business’s adversaries are, what they are doing, their motivations, and their capabilities.
• Software that gives them visibility into the threats within their IT estate – to identify the
vulnerabilities that exist and could be potentially exploited by the threat actors they have identified.

Ideally, an organization will have software that combines these two elements – that can map all of the IT
real estate, associate it with the vulnerabilities that exist, knowledge about how it could be exploited, and
intelligence on the threat actors who could attempt to exploit those vulnerabilities.

One of the challenges of compliance is ensuring all of the policies, processes, and procedures are well
documented and – critically – that the organization can evidence them. This is where a robust threat
intelligence platform can have a great impact.

Organizations should look for a threat intelligence platform that meets both the “collection” and “analysis”
stipulations, ideally in an automated manner – continuously gathering threat intelligence, analyzing it,
and presenting it to the end user in a non-technical format that makes it easy to make accurate and timely
risk-based decisions. Threat intelligence can be a labor-intensive job, particularly with the sheer number
and variety of threats that even a mid-sized organization may face, so taking advantage of automated
features will be invaluable to your cybersecurity team.

These tools will allow you to demonstrate that you are able to quickly identify threats that could impact
your business. For example, using a platform that can identify any staff credentials that are being sold or
leaked, will evidence that you have the visibility needed to quickly take mitigative action against that risk.

It’s also vital to show that you have full visibility of your IT infrastructure, all of the vulnerabilities that exist,
and the known exploits that exist for those vulnerabilities. This enables you to take (and demonstrate) a
risk-based approach to remediation.

Going beyond compliance

It is worth emphasizing that passing an audit should never be the end goal of implementing new security
controls such as threat intelligence. Standards like ISO 27001:2022 provide a helpful framework and are
important for ensuring a minimum level of security. However, all organizations should strive to implement
controls that go beyond the “minimum” and truly have an impact in protecting their organization’s
infrastructure, data, employees, customers, and partners. Meeting the new ISO requirements for threat
intelligence is a great first step, and 2025 will come around faster than you think, so organizations should
be starting now if they haven’t already. Putting the necessary platforms in place to give you visibility and
understanding of the threats your organization faces will be one of the most impactful steps you can take
on your security journey.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – June 2024 Edition 85
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