What is threat intelligence?

Sophos X-Ops Sophos Threat Research

Threat intelligence refers to the knowledge your business can use to understand or guard against cybersecurity dangers. It can come from internal and external sources and helps you identify security threats and the best ways to protect against them.

Why Threat Intelligence Is Important

1. Risk Management

Cyberthreat intelligence gives you insights that you can use to identify and address security risks before they lead to data breaches.

2. Financial Losses

You can use cyberthreat intelligence to understand the costs of ransomware and other cyberattacks, find ways to improve your security posture, and stop costly data breaches.

3. Cybersecurity Staffing

You can set up threat intelligence feeds to automatically collect and correlate data from multiple sources, transform your data into insights, and use these insights to make data-driven security decisions.

4. IT Infrastructure Protection

Threat intelligence helps you protect your IT infrastructure against current and emerging cyberattacks. It provides insights that highlight your cybersecurity strengths and weaknesses so you can address security gaps.

5. Cybersecurity Costs

You can use threat intelligence solutions to learn about cyberthreats and the risks associated with them, establish cybersecurity priorities, and invest in security tools. This helps you simultaneously level up your security and reduce your cybersecurity spending.

What to Expect from a Cyberthreat Intelligence Tool

1. URL Intelligence

URL intelligence consists of malicious URL feeds, reputation lookups, and other forms of web intelligence. It lets you analyze your URLs and look for phishing, ransomware, and other security issues that can impact their performance.

2. File Intelligence

You can utilize file intelligence to detect and block malicious files on your networks, collect and analyze file intelligence data from malware hashes, threat actors, and other sources, and classify unknown files before they execute.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

AI lets you analyze web page content and URLs. Meanwhile, you can use ML learning models with advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to detect business email compromise (BEC) scams and phishing emails. These models can also help you prioritize and triage threats.

4. Cloud Sandbox

A cloud sandbox prevents advanced persistent threats (APTs) from reaching your web and messaging security systems. The sandbox utilizes multiple threat detection technologies to help you identify threats and perform security analyses.

What Tools Do You Need for Advanced Threats?

1. Threat Hunting

A threat hunting tool lets you ask questions about cyberthreats and get insights into threats, their potential impact, and their context. Then, you can figure out the best ways to stop cyberattacks and data breaches.

In addition, a threat hunting tool can identify indicators of compromise (IoCs) across your IT infrastructure. You can use this tool to remotely access and investigate your devices and remediate compromised ones. The tool can even provide tips and tricks to help you hunt for and respond to threats.

2. Threat Investigation

A threat investigation tool allows you to analyze your security alerts and get insights into them, why they occurred, and what they mean. This ensures you can investigate cyberthreats and find ways to prevent them from recurring.

3. Threat Detection and Response (TDR)

TDR technology is built on a framework that consists of five components:

Prevention: Limits your attack surface, manages user-access controls, and applies security updates
Collection of Security Events, Alerts, and Detections: Retrieves and analyzes security data from multiple sources and produces insights
Prioritization of Threat Signals: Identifies and responds to urgent and important threat signals
Investigation: Uses the MITRE ATT&CK framework, common cybercrime tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and internationally recognized cybersecurity standards and protocols to investigate and respond to threats
Action: Remediates threats

Threat detection and response technology also helps you automatically identify and remediate cyberthreats in real time, look for suspicious behaviors or activities that indicate a cyberattack is occurring, and speed up remediation and mitigation.

4. Threat Mitigation

A threat mitigation tool isolates or contains a cyberthreat. At this point, you can assess the threat and figure out the best way to remediate it.

Also, a threat mitigation tool can notify you about a cyberthreat and provides tips and recommendations to help you mitigate it.

Sophos MDR: An All-in-One Security Tool for Advanced Threats

Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a traditional MDR service — and much more.

A traditional MDR service notifies you about cyberattacks or suspicious events. Once it does, you're responsible for threat response and remediation. If you miss a security alert, a cyberthreat will escalate. And, if you are struggling to respond to a threat, you put your business, its employees, and its customers in danger.

Sophos MDR offers security features beyond those available with a traditional MDR service, such as:

Compatible with Existing Telemetry Providers

Sophos MDR is compatible with CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Check Point, Darktrace, Google, Okta, Rapid7, and many other security telemetry providers. It automatically consolidates, correlates, and prioritizes security telemetry with insights from the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem (ACE) and Sophos X-Ops threat intelligence unit.

Advanced Threat Notification

Sophos MDR is backed by threat hunters and response experts that are available 24/7/365. These threat hunters and response experts look for and validate cyberthreats and security incidents, assess the scope and severity of cyberthreats, and remotely disrupt, contain, and neutralize them. They also provide you with insights you can use to address the root causes of recurring incidents.

Machine-Accelerated Human Response

Sophos MDR blends ML technology with expert security analysis to help you hunt for and respond to cyberthreats. It lets you investigate security alerts and get insights you can use to eliminate cyberthreats.

Full Transparency and Control

Sophos MDR gives you complete control over threat detection and response. You decide how to respond to cyberthreats and initiate response actions and determine who should be included in security incident communications. There's even three response modes you can choose from:

Notify: We notify you if we detect a threat and provide you with details about it. This allows you to prioritize and respond to the threat however you choose.
Collaborate: Once we detect a threat, we reach out to your security team or another point of contact. From here, we work with you to respond to the threat.
Authorize: If you want to leave threat detection and response to us, we've got you covered. If we detect a threat, we'll contain and neutralize it for you and let you know what action(s) we've taken.