Just like a threat feeds on a journalist website or social media platform shows continuous updates, threat feeds provide cybersecurity professionals with ongoing, automated streams of information and insights they can use to help protect their networks. This data can be anything from traditional indicators of compromise (IoCs) to suspicious domains and IP addresses, known malware hashes, or even details on how an attacker accessed a system in the first place.
To ensure the best use of these threat intelligence feeds, teams need to make sure that they can quickly and accurately correlate them with local logs and security events from tools deployed in their networks. That’s why it is important for security teams to consider a threat intelligence solution that combines the information provided by third-party sources with their own local intelligence.
“Monitoring Threats: Harnessing Threat Feeds for Protection
A threat intelligence platform can pre-process multiple threat feeds to make them more usable to IT security teams by reducing the volume of alerts they receive and by providing relevant context to their findings. It’s important to note that not all threat feeds are equal, and that the type of information provided by a specific feed will vary depending on its intended purpose. For example, a strategic threat intelligence feed may be used for risk assessment and to determine whether the company’s current cyber protection policy is adequate, while an operational threat intelligence feed may be incorporated into a specific tool or service.
When selecting a threat intelligence feed, it’s also necessary to take into account the cost of subscription and whether the data is human-readable or formatted for direct integration into a security system such as an intrusion detection system (IDS), endpoint detection and response (EDR) services, or extended detection and response (XDR) packages. It’s also a good idea to look at the reliability and accuracy of each feed, who owns it, and how often it is updated.