“THREAT INTELLIGENCE” Sure, there’s plenty out there but, are you an analyst?

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From Dell’s CTU page

Threat Intelligence

Time is of the essence when protecting your organization’s critical information assets against cyberthreats. However, finding the security intelligence that matters most to your organization consumes precious time and adds strains to in-house resources already stretched too thin. At times, days or even months can pass before vulnerabilities in your environment are patched, increasing business risk and expanding the window of exposure.

Leveraging Dell SecureWorks’ global threat visibility across thousands of customer networks, proprietary toolsets and unmatched expertise, the Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) security research team performs in-depth analysis of emerging threats and zero-day vulnerabilities.

Powered by CTU research, the Dell SecureWorks Threat Intelligence service delivers early warnings and actionable security intelligence tailored specifically to your environment, enabling you to quickly protect against threats and vulnerabilities before they impact your organization. The Threat Intelligence service enables you to reduce considerable risk by closing the window of exposure more quickly, and also enables you to spend more time devoted to quickly remediating the risks most pertinent to your organization.

Threat Intelligence services provide:

• Proactive, actionable intelligence tailored to your environment
• Clear, concise threat & vulnerability analyses
• Detailed remediation information & recommendations
• Consultation with our threat experts
• On-demand access to extensive threat & vulnerability databases
• Malware analysis upon request
• XML intelligence feeds
• Integration with other Dell SecureWorks services for correlation and unified reporting

ACRONYM SOUP

Threat Intelligence: THREATINTEL another acronym or name of something we in the INFOSEC world are now hearing as a mantra of what we need. Vendors are pimping this idea as they “cloud-ify” their solutions (SOPHOS etc) to give you the proper “Threat Intelligence” for your org. Plug in threat intelligence into Google and you will get zillions of hits that are sales pitches right off the bat. However, recently on the LiquidMatrix podcast the question was posed of “just what is the meaning of threat intelligence?”

I think that is a very important question and perhaps there are more of you out there who may not know. Certainly there are C levels out there I am sure who haven’t a clue what it means as well. A basic understanding of English will tell you that this activity involves threats and their detection, but as a company what are the threats that they would be looking for? A person with a military background may have another idea altogether of “Threat Intelligence” as they may not be so much focused on network or computer issues. Instead they may focus on physical security and the threat of individuals. Still others with a mind toward the world of intelligence, may see a more nuanced picture of the same term with bigger pictures and more subtle ideas.

The upshot here is that for each person or group that takes up the idea of monitoring threat intelligence, they first have to know what they are particularly interested in keeping an eye on, and how their organizations need that intelligence to work for them.

Threat Intelligence Takes Many Forms

In today’s world and from where I am seeing (or actually hearing it used most) is in the world of information security. In this instance, and for the thrust of this article I would like to define the types of threat intelligence that we should be paying attention to in no specific order as all are an equal part of the larger picture:

• Malware types and propagation
• Phishing exploits in the wild and their modus operandi
• Vulnerabilities out in the open (new and old)
• Your AV and IDS/HIDS/NIDS capabilities (stratified? Not? Multiple types?)
• SIEM and Network Monitoring of health/traffic
• Network centric asset management (a good network diagram that is updated frequently)
• Hardware asset management (knowing what you have and where it is)
• Software asset management (knowing what you use and what should and should not be there)
• Network landscapes (yours and others connected to you)
• Potential Aggressors or bad actors and their types
• News Cycles on hackers and hacks
• Political and social “net” movements
• Your social media posture (PR etc) in the world at large (i.e. social media monitoring of your org being talked about)
• The state of morale at your organization
• Industrial espionage potentials for your org (what you hold and why it might be of interest to a nation state or other)
• Patching and your network landscape
• The security posture of the orgs that work with you and have connection to you
• The threat to any orgs that you are affiliated with and connected to (i.e. higher threat and poorer security posture make for a higher threat overall to you)
• Actionable intelligence from IDS/IPS as well as trending data from a SOC (Security Operations Center)

As you can see from the above, it’s not just getting your hands on an IDS/IPS or a SOC service and looking at the attacks currently being aimed at you. You have to know the environment, know the players both inside and outside of your organization and be able to extrapolate a big picture view that you can then drill down into and have a deep understanding of.

Is this always possible in every org? Certainly not…

However, all of these factors above could lead to a technical compromise as well as perhaps an insider leak of information that could cause you great damage. You see, this has to be a more holistic picture and not just a network centric approach in order to have a better chance at protecting yourself. The focus for many of us in the information security sphere all too often just takes the form of technical means of security when the picture is much more complex. Unfortunately though, this is where many of the companies out there looking to sell appliances and cloud services lead companies and C levels astray.

Threat Intelligence Snake Oil

Sure, a SOC and an IDS/IPS is always a good thing. I am not saying that going without one is a super fantastic idea. What I am saying is first, you have to know your appliance. Know how it works as well as what the alerts mean yourselves, not just let the service dictate to you what an alert means. Now this means that you should have technically capable people who can read an alert, know the environment well, and determine “if” an alert is indeed valid.

Remember the old axiom “A fool with a tool… Is still a fool”

SOC services today often also say they offer you threat intelligence reports. These often are regurgitation’s of news stories on current hacks that have happened as well as patches being put out for various systems. No doubt these are good, but, they don’t always have everything you need to understand the threats. This is if you even get this feature, some places may in fact only offer the IDS/IPS and it will alert you alone without real context other than a CVE and some technical details. It is important when you decide to get a threat intelligence piece in addition to an IDS/IPS service, that you look at their alerts and get a good working picture of just how much information they are collecting, it’s relevance to your org, and its timeliness. After all, if you get an important piece of data the day after an attack, its already too late right?

This is all predicated though on the idea that you have someone or group of people who understand threat intelligence principles and how to apply them to your particular environment. This is where you need “Analysts” Even with a good SOC service that has good threat intelligence for you, it’s useless unless YOU have an analyst who can interpret the data.

Threat Intelligence Requires Analysis

A common issue in the intelligence game is having analysts who understand not only the data, the complexities of environments, and the big picture view of things, but also the ability to “analyze” data and extrapolate from it in a cogent way. Recently Jeffery Carr posted a blog on Infosec Island that was particularly prescient about the need to have the right psychology when performing analysis. He is absolutely right and in his article it was specifically around the intelligence collected by agencies like the CIA. You however are likely not the CIA but, you still need to have an approach to your threat intelligence in the same vein.

The technical side of the threat intelligence needs to be married with the social and psychological as well to have the big picture view of your threats. As I mentioned above, you need to know who might have it in for you, who might target you, why would they target you, and other motivations to have a better grasp of your threat matrix. For this, you need an analyst, or analysts, not just a report from the SOC. The same can be said just for the technical side of the house as well. If you have technical alerts but no real insight into how they work as well as what you presently have in your environment, then it’s game over really. The same can be said if you don’t have an analyst who can then extrapolate all of this into a cogent means of getting it across to the C levels that there is an issue(s) and the urgency or not of remediating them.

Analyses and analysts then, are the linchpin to the whole process. Without good analysis, then the service is useless really.

Graphic from: dmrattner.com

It is paramount to have a working program of threat intelligence as opposed to just getting a service and thinking you are all set. This to me, would be the next level of “Candy Security” in that you are laying all your eggs in the basket of some service like so many still today think that they have a firewall and their all good. As we have seen in the last few years alone, the threatscape of the online world has grown from just malware that steals bank data to malware and attacks that have much broader scope and end goals as well as aggressors that are thinking much more laterally in their approaches.

So once again, analysis is key.

Final Analysis

As the complexity of attacks grow at a rate outstripping the pace of “Moores Law” the defenders have to take up a more nuanced approach to protecting their environments and their data. Reliance on technical solutions alone is not tenable, and as I have said in the past, you have to look at the creature behind the keyboard to get a better picture of the attack much of the time. A better understanding of all of the areas mentioned above will give you a higher chance of at least keeping some pace with the attacks out there against you.

Without analysis and insight, you are in an oubliet.. And you will want to “forget” because if you really think about the threats just from not knowing what goes on in your environment, you won’t be sleeping much. Consider your threat intelligence program if you have one, and if you don’t consider starting one.

K.