Driving Security From Analytics to Action With Security Intelligence

Do you ever feel like your organization’s security is out of sync with your intelligence? Sure, you’ve got plenty of data — but there’s a lack of context, alignment, and responsiveness across your security and IT teams that often results in lost time and resources.

Recorded Future embeds security intelligence into the core of every security workflow, function, and decision — so you can mitigate risk and turn internal and external data into business value. Read on this article to discover how security intelligence can transform your entire security program today.

In many organizations today, intelligence and security are out of sync. Teams and objectives are siloed, analysis lacks relevance, and the response is slow and reactionary — resulting in lost time and wasted resources.

To drive down risk while achieving meaningful operational outcomes, intelligence must be embedded into the core of every security workflow, function, and decision. This requires a unified approach for collecting, analyzing, and automating data and insights.

With Recorded Future, security intelligence is more than a methodology — it’s a mindset, a philosophy for how we empower our clients with the intelligence they need to drive every security initiative and strategic decision across their organizations.

Read on this article to discover how security intelligence and its outputs can transform your security program and make the greatest impact. In it, you will:

• Explore the three primary security intelligence benefits that directly translate to operational gains
• Learn how security intelligence can be used flexibly to improve visibility and output, automate response, and amplify value across six distinct, strategic solution areas
• Get practical recommendations for starting your security intelligence journey with quick, measurable wins — and with maturation across additional use cases over time

Content Summary

Embedding Intelligence for a Security Advantage
Security Intelligence: By Design
The Single Source of Truth Across Your Organization
Common Approach, Meaningful Outcomes
Supercharge 6 Critical Security Solution Areas
One Plus One Equals Three
Security Intelligence That Fits Your Organization
Think Big, Start Smart
Advance When and How You Want
Kick-Off With Quick Wins
Reach Higher With Security Intelligence

Embedding Intelligence for a Security Advantage

Too often, intelligence and security are out of sync. Teams and objectives are siloed, analysis lacks relevance, and the response is slow and reactionary — resulting in lost time and resources. Of course, the alignment of intelligence and security is precisely where organizations can see some of their most dramatic operational gains, whatever the security or risk initiative may be. When we take a unified approach by embedding analytics and automation into the core of everyday security workflows and decision-making, security intelligence, and its outputs can transform security and make the greatest impact.

Security Intelligence: By Design

Functionally, security intelligence is a method by which data and insights are collected, analyzed, and automated to accelerate distinct security systems and functions. More than that, it’s a mindset; a philosophy for how intelligence can drive every security initiative and strategic decision. In the same vein as other “by design” doctrines, security intelligence brings automation and insight to the forefront of every facet of security, including strategic planning, technical design and architecture, and implementation and execution.

More concretely, Recorded Future uses this definition:

Security Intelligence: An outcomes-centric approach to reducing risk that fuses external and internal threat, security, and business insights across an entire organization.

The Single Source of Truth Across Your Organization

You can apply security intelligence to practically any security, threat, or risk initiative you manage. Take, for example, phishing prevention and vulnerability management: two distinct functions that share little in common in terms of technology, experience, and task execution. Yet, both can benefit from security intelligence and the tailored data collection, analysis, and workflow automation that it produces.

Security intelligence enables organizations to build, store, and reapply common insights and operational workflows wherever possible — rather than starting from scratch each time. As security intelligence expands to additional functions and stakeholders, the organization maintains institutional knowledge and the data and insights grow more robust for every security initiative.

Common Approach, Meaningful Outcomes

With a common process and framework underlying security intelligence, the business benefits, and security outcomes also share similarities for any security, risk, or threat initiative it supports. In particular, security intelligence benefits fall into three primary categories:

Dynamic, 360-degree visibility. Across every security intelligence use-case, visibility benefits are constant. With contextualized, real-time understanding of your internal and external threat environments, once-vulnerable blindspots become tactical advantages in your ongoing efforts to combat adversaries. Success hinges on the quality of the insight you can generate — specifically its reach, speed, and relevance to the business — making security intelligence all the more important. With security intelligence powering your strategic initiatives, you will detect threats faster, develop a more intricate and actionable understanding of your threat environments, and better track your attack surface, overall.

Operational efficiency, integration, and automation. Security intelligence integrates with your existing security technology stack to reduce manual and resource-intensive processes. For example, rather than researching individual security events with information spread across multiple dashboards, you can easily insert Recorded Future’s intelligence directly into your SIEM, or any security application (e.g., SOAR, NGFW, VRM, among others). Efficiency gains from technical integration and automation ultimately mean fewer tasks with faster resolutions for your security operations team, intuitive single-pane-of-glass decisioning, and standardized processes to expedite remediation.

Business, risk, and stakeholder alignment. Security intelligence only works when the data and operational outputs are specifically tailored and relevant to you: Your organization, your people, your processes and procedures, and your assets, threats, and risk tolerance. Among the scores of metadata, security intelligence relies on three contextual lenses that appropriately set its scope and purpose:

1. Links and associations to the business
2. Threat and risk severity
3. Stakeholder and functional relevance

When applied and analyzed from this perspective, security intelligence enables you to more accurately assess and respond to risk, automatically prioritize CVEs based on threat severity, and filter out noisy threat feeds and hacker chatter to minimize false-positives and enrich more important investigation and response.

Supercharge 6 Critical Security Solution Areas

Intelligence is no longer a side project or siloed within a threat intelligence team. Security intelligence supports a wide range of roles and functions across all security activities, including physical and information security, fraud, IT, risk, compliance, executive reporting, and more.

Given the diverse array of security intelligence use-cases, you need to treat security intelligence not as one tool, but as a modularized solution capable of extending to distinct security activities. The core capabilities lay a common foundation for security intelligence, typically including the collection, analysis, scoring, automation, integration, and dashboards and reporting. Then, solution-specific functionality augments the platform and tailors it to the unique needs and activities of one or more distinct security intelligence solution areas. These solution areas are listed alphabetically here:

Brand Protection. From phishing attacks to stolen PII, to fake mobile apps and social media accounts — how far does your attack surface extend and where has your data leaked? Security intelligence equips organizations with continuous visibility to monitor and detect new cases of unsanctioned mentions, data leaks, and impersonations of your corporate brand. Security intelligence, however, doesn’t end at the detection of brand threats — it also streamlines the takedown and remediation steps on your behalf.

Geopolitical Risk. Discover how physical threats manifest, and often mirror, online threat activity. Applying geodata and other location-based analytics, security intelligence acts as your eyes and ears online. It keeps watch of your physical assets and facilities providing early signals of planned attacks, protests, and acts of terror. Security intelligence also serves as a physical protection layer, delivering alerts about your executives and key personnel who may be high-value targets in kidnapping, extortion, or other scenarios where their physical safety and well-being may be at risk.

SecOps and Response. Accelerate alert triage. Minimize false-positives. Automate response workflows. When you advance security operations and response-related activities with security intelligence in these three areas, you are all but guaranteed to uplevel the output of your team in significant ways. Security intelligence works across all three. Your team works faster and more efficiently when equipped with the unique context and powerful analytics of security intelligence. Investigations are more comprehensive, so analysts spend less time on meaningless alerts and see even fewer false positives. Security intelligence also accelerates the response, automating the corresponding action, alerting, and orchestration to your connected systems and applications.

Third-Party Risk. Even the best, most-exhaustive vendor questionnaires and controls are not enough to manage third-party risk today. The data becomes obsolete when it’s returned, and gaps in responses and evidentiary materials turn risk prioritization and heat map exercises into a game of darts. Security intelligence fills these gaps. It supplements what you know about your third-parties with deeper, primary-sourced data and risk analysis. With this information at your fingertips, you can make immediate, better-informed decisions about third-party risk and what to mitigate when it’s needed — without waiting weeks for responses.

Threat Intelligence. Security intelligence empowers threat intelligence analysts to focus on the adversary and the broader threat environment at large. When applied to the threat intelligence function, security intelligence uses extensive collection and human and machine analysis of threat data to generate valuable insights, which are used to:

1. Understand the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) of various threat actors
2. Determine attacker motives
3. Track pertinent macro trends from various industry, region, and geopolitical vantage points

With these threat intelligence objectives in mind, security intelligence further enhances threat analysis by adding crucial business and security context. As a result, threat analysts reduce time spent researching irrelevant threats and gain deeper, more detailed information on the events they do research.

Vulnerability Management. An excruciating activity for security professionals, vulnerability management continues to hamper security efforts, as well as the IT teams who perform the actual patching. The crux of the issue is there are too many high and critical CVEs —but there is no risk contextualization for the specific organization and its IT environment. Security intelligence provides a vital context to CVEs, making it possible to assess how actively they’re being exploited, and by whom. Armed with this information, security teams can conduct more complete, risk-based prioritization of their CVEs — so the vulnerabilities most-gravely exposing the organization are addressed first.

One Plus One Equals Three

It’s important to note that all six security intelligence solution areas operate entirely independently of the other five. So, no matter which solutions you put into action, you get the same high-quality capabilities and alerts. Even better, when you extend security intelligence to additional solution areas, they feed into each other by sharing the data, context, and integration across multiple solutions.

Implementing additional solutions will increase the value of your security intelligence exponentially. For instance, here’s how you may find that your third-party risk solution augments the capabilities and insight of your existing brand protection activities: Let’s say you’re conducting a third-party risk review and you identify a particularly concerning risk event for one of your strategic partners. You discover that they had a data breach that could damage your company’s reputation because the incident resulted in your partner leaking sensitive data that your customers entrusted to your organization. The complementary nature of security intelligence solutions adds value both as a discrete solution and as an aggregate, resulting in new economies of scale as it expands.

Security Intelligence That Fits Your Organization

Security intelligence easily scales up and down to match the size, maturity, and specific needs of any organization. Whether you’re new to the technology and still identifying your goals, or you’re a longstanding proponent with aggressive expansion plans, security intelligence adapts to your needs and priorities. Recorded Future’s modular security intelligence solutions ensure it’s easy to adopt additional solutions to adapt over time without arduous implementations or steep learning curves.

Think Big, Start Smart

Practically every security function can extract value from the exponential benefits and technical advantages of a robust security intelligence program. Take this into account as you determine your implementation strategy with clear priorities in mind and ideas for who will benefit the most right out of the gate. Six, 12, 18 months from now, how do you want your organization to be using security intelligence? What will it take to get there?

Starting smart is about starting with purpose — not just speed — in mind. Whether you want to implement a single security intelligence solution area or all six, the most successful organizations we see tend to begin similarly — with a clear, concerted approach based on a set timeline. Adopt an agile mindset for both your security intelligence rollout and ongoing activities. Doing so will keep you dynamic and poised to shift as quickly as your adversaries.

Advance When and How You Want

Since security intelligence is modular, your adoption of it can be too. For instance, maybe you’re using security intelligence to monitor the dark web and you begin to realize the value it would bring as a correlation and enrichment source for your incident response and security operations, as well. Within a short timeframe, you can have your security intelligence inserted directly into your SIEM, to keep the bulk of your work on the analytics platform your team already knows inside and out. From that point on, it’s up to you. With the flexibility Recorded Future enables, security intelligence quickly becomes an in-demand security capability across your security teams.

Kick-Off With Quick Wins

Wherever you are in your security intelligence journey, there are easy, practical steps that will ensure you get the most from security intelligence. When you begin your next security intelligence project, make sure you:

Identify success metrics and reports early on. Assign performance metrics for security intelligence before launching new capabilities. You may elect to benchmark your mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) new threats, the number of alerts that are enhanced with intelligence, or how many feeds are being ingested. Alternatively, you could measure analyst efficiency. For example, one study shows that Recorded Future improved customers’ security workflows by 50%. If you expect similar efficiency gains given the size and scope of your security intelligence and automation plans, you can track a similar percentage gain for your organization. As long as the metrics you set are based on realistic assumptions, you will have a valuable barometer to continuously mature your program over time.

Recognize the ROI. You will see nearly instantaneous returns on your initial investments into security intelligence. An independent analysis conducted by Forrester found that Recorded Future customers have seen 328% ROI on their security intelligence improvements. With a short, 3-month payback period and high ROI, articulating the value in terms of business benefit should help you gain internal buy-in.

Identify opportunities with the security tools you already use. Integrating security intelligence into your existing technologies and applications is an excellent first step. This minimizes the disruption to existing work streams and adds netnew capabilities that accelerate or enhance the outputs of the existing work being done. Recorded Future works with all of the leading security technology providers to offer quick, templated integrations for solutions in categories like SIEM, SOAR, IR, EDR, GRC, and many more. For even further integration and system customization, Recorded Future provides robust, bi-directional RESTful APIs to support your work the way you need it.

Loop security intelligence back in for continuous feedback. Insights from security intelligence empower security decision-makers with an unbiased lens into many facets of their operations and external threat environment. During your strategic planning, it’s worth spending some time analyzing recent reports and detected events for emerging trends in attack vectors that may influence the projects and strategies you choose to prioritize.

Reach Higher With Security Intelligence

Security intelligence is the cyber fuel you need to power and propel your security forward. Use it to extend your visibility, to elevate your output, and to automate your response for any or all six solution areas.

As you embed security intelligence more broadly throughout your organization, the returns you see will begin to grow exponentially within and across each solution. Whatever your priorities, security intelligence will evolve with them to amplify your risk reduction efforts and drive you — your team, your objectives, your business — to reach even higher echelons of performance and efficiency.

Source: Recorded Future