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What is threat intelligence?
Cyber threat intelligence is the collection, processing, and analysis of data that helps experts understand how threat actors behave and how you can mitigate attacks before they cause any real harm.
Why is threat intelligence important?
By utilizing threat intelligence, experts can optimize your organization’s cybersecurity to stay ahead of pertinent threats.
Organizations that use threat intelligence can spot vulnerabilities and loopholes that would otherwise enable attackers to steal and leak sensitive company data.
Cyberattack data analysis allows you to find patterns in these threats and use them to put relevant security measures in place.
Cybersecurity professionals share their insights with the community to build a collective knowledge database.
Threat intelligence can help create automated systems that prevent payment fraud and malicious account takeovers.
The threat intelligence lifecycle
The threat intelligence lifecycle is the iterative process comprised of six distinctive phases for collecting, managing, and deploying threat intelligence.
Planning and direction
The threat intelligence lifecycle begins by assessing the possible threats and determining which processes it will focus on.
Collection
Once it has made a preliminary assessment, the threat intelligence team shifts its focus to identifying and gathering relevant data.
Processing and exploitation
Before moving on to analysis, threat intelligence teams converts the collected data into a unified, cohesive system.
Analysis
The threat intelligence team analyzes the data, resulting in useful information for making cybersecurity decisions within the organization.
Dissemination
The threat intelligence team presents its conclusions to the main stakeholders and makes recommendations to address the issues.
Feedback
After studying the team’s conclusions, the stakeholders provide their own thoughts. The back-and-forth continues until a satisfactory decision is reached.
Five types of threat intelligence
Security teams and analysts recognize five main types of threat intelligence: tactical, operational, strategic, technical, and contextual.
Tactical intelligence is the most basic form of threat intelligence. It identifies, analyzes, and eliminates specific threats, like suspicious traffic that may indicate botnet operations.
Operational threat intelligence involves studying cyberthreat trends to identify future attacks — for example, examining social engineering attempts (like phishing emails) and scouting out planned cybercrimes.
Strategic threat intelligence refers to the broad threat analysis done for the benefit of the organization’s decision makers to help them avoid data breaches and ransomware attacks.
Technical threat intelligence involves analyzing low-level technical details to identify indicators of compromise. The identified exploits and attack patterns inform the development of cybersecurity tools.
Contextual threat intelligence focuses on the circumstances of a particular sector. For example, luxury goods companies don’t have to worry about cyber warfare from hostile nation state threat actors, but government agencies do.
Threat intelligence and NordVPN
At NordVPN, we make extensive use of threat intelligence to develop tools for your everyday security and privacy online. Our VPN security is informed by a careful analysis of potential attacks against both individual users and our organization as a whole.
We also aim to provide a threat intelligence platform for regular internet users. If you are interested in learning about prominent threats, have a look at NordVPN’s cybersecurity glossary and our Threat Center. By educating yourself on current and emerging cyber threats, you will be able to sidestep costly issues in the future.
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