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Understanding the significance of threat intelligence to enhance cybersecurity practices. 

The growth of the threat landscape is relentless and no one business is immune to this. Despite integrating advanced cybersecurity technologies, organizations are facing increased data breaches. While businesses of all types and sizes across the world increasingly adopt a risk-based approach to manage cyber threats in proportion to best-practice, there has been a steep rise of cyber threat intelligence. The adoption of cyber threat intelligence in organizations looking to safeguard their networks from sophisticated cyberattacks is crucial. This is substantially imperative as most critical infrastructure within a company relies on operational technology that opens access to cyberattacks.

Threat intelligence typically refers to knowledge and skills that allow a business to thwart potential attacks. This concept of this cybersecurity approach leverages data and provides context like who is attacking, what are their motivation and capabilities, and what indicators of compromise in the systems to look for. This information can assist a leader to make informed decisions about company security.

Making use of the best cyber threat intelligence solutions, such as machine learning that can automate data collection and processing, integrate with existing solutions, take in unstructured data from diverse sources, and then connect the dots by providing context on indicators of compromise and the tactics, techniques, and procedures of threat actors.

Enabling Device Visibility and Network Monitoring with CTI

Capitalizing on CTI (cyber threat intelligence) effectively is complex owing to poor data quality and actionability. This means many organizations’ use of CTI is vain. As we already mentioned above that the intelligence-driven security approach is able to find questions around cybercriminals, type of attacks and their motivations, CTI encompasses three categories – strategic, operational, and tactical. 

Strategic threat intelligence lets information security leaders prioritize security investments to encounter growing threats such as insecure IoT devices or advanced persistent threat groups targeting specific industry verticals. Operational threat intelligence gives organizations the ability to take defensive actions to minimize risk from threats. And, tactical threat intelligence enables investigation of ongoing attacks in an organization’s network, either based on intrusion detection alerts or proactively via threat hunting.

Cyber threat intelligence is well-recognized to be the domain of best analysts, enhancing value across security functions for organizations, irrespective of sizes. However, when this concept of cybersecurity is treated as a separate function within a broader security paradigm, instead of an essential component that supplements every other function, it results in the inaccessibility of its benefits that it provides to businesses.

Comprehensively, leveraging cyber threat intelligence provides benefits to every level of state, local, tribal, and territorial public and private entities. By integrating it with the security solutions businesses already use, security professionals automatically get alerts on potential threats.