One significant negative implication of technology’s continual evolution is proportional advancement in nefarious internet activities, particularly cyber attacks. The past few years have seen a rising sophistication in cyber attacks at levels never experienced before. The worst fact is that attacks will likely only continue to get more advanced. To fight them, enterprises need to be armed with greater security tools. Legacy approaches to cybersecurity no longer cut it.

Many cybersecurity attacks today are highly targeted. Attackers spend a good deal of time gathering information on their prey (usually months) and carefully looking for a chance, even the slightest, to pounce. Organizations that don’t invest in cyber threat intelligence are the weakest in the face of such kinds of attacks. Besides avoiding zero-day vulnerabilities, enterprises must also protect their system’s endpoints and develop a smart cyber breach response plan.

Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)

According to Gartner, threat intelligence is “evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and actionable advice, about an existing or emerging menace or hazard to assets that can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject’s response to that menace or hazard.”

Put simply, it involves the collection and processing of information about threat actors and their methods for the purpose of defense. CTI solutions usually feature artificial intelligence and machine learning and integrate with other security solutions in order to ensure accurate data processing. CTI helps organizations to be more proactive than reactive in their approach to cybersecurity.

By enabling human analysts to make sense of the enormous data available, these solutions help organizations to understand their cybersecurity risks and build effective defensive mechanisms, a path to cyber-resilience. Cyber threat intelligence particularly helps the IT team better manage and even avoid zero-day exploits by continually alerting them to vulnerabilities and indicators of compromise.

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