4 Ways Analysts Can Make More Sense of Threat Data

<p>As an analyst, it is your job to uncover massive amounts of data and analyze it to discover patterns and recognize potential threats. With so much information to sort through, this can be a daunting task. Luckily, as technology advances, so do threat detection tools and automation. Here are four tips to help you make a clearer sense of threat data.</p><p><strong>1.   Identifying Threats</strong></p><p>The first step to understanding is identifying and understanding potential threats, which can come in many forms. <a href="http://www.iso.org/iso/home.html"><strong>ISO 27005</strong></a> broadly defines a threat as, “a potential cause of an incident that may result in harm of systems and organization.”  A potential cause of an incident is essentially anything that adversely impacts your information system—from unauthorized access to destruction of data. Obviously for our purposes we are talking about cyber threats, but it is important not to overlook physical threats as well, such as natural disasters and accidental malfunctions.</p><p><strong>2.  Got Data?</strong></p><p>Gathering data is just one part of the larger process. Once you have all the information, you must have a proper strategy in place to analyze and process it. The single most effective way to manage this is through a threat intelligence platform. Rather than working in silos, this allows your team to actually work together like a team sharing data. And, you can go beyond just aggregating data to analyzing it. Threat intelligence is the present and future of threat data understanding, letting you accelerate and streamline security workflow across your organization. Piecemail approaches including intrusion detection systems and incident response methodologies are no longer sophisticated enough to keep pace with threats.</p><p><strong>3. Learn From Your Peers</strong></p><p>Who can understand your plight better than other analysts? Get a leg up on hackers and cyber attacks through knowledge sharing. Your job is to take epic amounts of data and make sense of it and your fellow analysts can understand and help you achieve this task. Pulling internal and external threat data and combining it helps clarify trends, patterns, and profiles. Once you have analyzed threat data, you can put together a united, organization-wide defense.</p><p><strong>4.   Seeing the Big Picture</strong></p><p>Analyzing incomplete data is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing—you can make a concerted effort, but you will never truly be able to solve the puzzle. The most effective way to understand threats is to start with the most credible data. Since data is difficult to measure in terms of amount or volume, you must also assess the types of data that present threats. Once that is sorted into classes or categories, such as political, industry-based, geographical, etc., then you will begin to see the bigger picture of threats.</p><p>Remember threat data is a vast web of information. You can certainly learn a lot by looking at each strand of the web, but in order to form a complete profile of vulnerabilities, it is much more effective to look at the web as a whole. Once the information is gathered, it can be reconstructed into a web of information that is easier to digest and respond to.</p><p>Download the <a href="{page_3458}"><strong>Security Intelligence and Information Sharing Strategy</strong></a> whitepaper and learn more about the new approach to threat intelligence using trusted collaboration.</p>