How to Identify Cyber Threats

Threat intelligence is an important part of any cyber defense strategy. Threat intelligence typically involves any activities that help stop threat actors before they inflict damage on an organization. It’s an important part of proactive cyber defense, which is much more effective than waiting for the threat actors to try and breach your systems. 

Knowing how to identify cyber threats is important if you are to stop threat actors before they strike. 

Cyber threats can be represented in many forms. They can be internal vulnerabilities. For example, if your employees use weak passwords, that can be exploited by a threat actor to gain unauthorized access into your organization. 

Cyber threats can also be indicated by external events. For example, the activities of threat actors on the dark web could signal an imminent attack on an organization. 

A successful attack can be costly, as multiple incidents in the recent past have shown. Your organization could lose money, proprietary information, personally identifiable information, and – most importantly – the trust of your clients and the general public. 

It is therefore imperative to have the capability to identify threats and deal with them proactively. This article will go over various ways to do that. 

Penetration Testing 

You are more likely to identify the vulnerabilities of your organization’s systems if you think like a threat actor. However, it can be difficult to do that accurately. The most expedient solution is to hire penetration testers to try and breach your system. 

If you have the resources, you can run some sort of bounty program and reward testers for finding vulnerabilities. With the right monetary reward, the testers will be sufficiently motivated and, usually, if there are vulnerabilities to be found, they will identify them. 

One of the main disadvantages of penetration testing is that it is costly. Hiring the best testers to try and crack your system doesn’t come cheap. 

However, the results are worth it as they will help you deal with any vulnerabilities in your system. 

Threat Intelligence 

Compiling periodic threat intelligence reports is best practice in the cyber defense industry. 

You can compile such a report for senior executives to show them the importance of directing resources to cyber defense and implementing organization-wide policies to boost cyber security

You can also compile a report for your cyber security counterparts in the organization. This one is more technical. It can contain information as general as that of the latest attack techniques from an industry perspective. It can also contain information as specific as network anomalies and other potential indicators of compromise. 

Technical threat intelligence helps cyber security professionals notice potential weak links. 

In recent years, the practice of threat intelligence has expanded to include external intelligence collected from the web. To do this, an automatic threat intelligence platform is required. 

Cyber Threat Monitoring 

An automated, AI-powered threat intelligence platform is one of the best ways to perform cyber threat monitoring.

Cyber threat monitoring is the practice of surveilling the web for information that could indicate an attack on an organization. For this sort of threat intelligence to be effective, data has to be collected from all levels of the web, including the surface, deep, and dark web. 

Working with data from all over the internet is compute-intensive. To begin with, such a task is out of the range of manual processing by security analysts. There is too much data to handle and too little time. 

The only way to fruitfully handle such big data is through artificial intelligence and such technologies as machine learning and natural language processing. 

Machine learning helps make sense of all the unstructured data and turn it into meaningful data. Machine learning models generate events and actors from the data. 

Natural language processing helps classify objects into actors and events in addition to making it possible to gather intelligence from multiple languages. This technique also helps administer queries. For example, to maintain situational awareness, an organization could monitor all pertinent news by setting a keyword as a parameter in a query. 

Such monitoring of threats on the web has proven helpful. 

Web investigation software alerts security personnel whenever it detects any suspicious activity about an organization on the dark web. For instance, if threat actors accessed private data and attempted to sell it on the dark web, the software would instantly alert security personnel. This would give them the chance to proactively intervene and possibly stop the attack.