Strategic Threat Intelligence

Strategic Threat Intelligence: View from the War Room

Strategic threat intelligence is the most high-level form of threat intelligence, both in terms of its technical details and the audience for whom it's intended. It's the view from the war room, far removed from the chaos and noise of the front line, giving stakeholders the big picture of threats to their organization to make informed decisions on budgets, investments, and policies.

What is Strategic Threat Intelligence?

Strategic threat intelligence examines how threats and attacks are changing over time, not in day-to-day activities, but long-term shifts in the threat landscape. It helps to craft long-term strategies to manage cyber risks and strengthen their overall security posture.

Strategic intelligence concerns the "who" and "why" of the threat landscape, compared to other types of intelligence that look at how and where attacks unfold or details such as indicators of compromise (IoCs). Strategic threat intelligence looks at:

  • Broad threat trends over a long period of time (one year or more)
  • Heavy-hitting threat actors and groups (including advanced persistent threats)
  • Geopolitical events with cyber components (e.g., wars, elections, shifts in international relations, and trade developments)

Details Included in Strategic Threat Intelligence

  • Profile data on threat actors, motivations, and attributions
  • Historical threat trends and changes in attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) over time
  • Potential attack vectors and likely targets
  • Trends for targeted industries and geographies
  • Cyberattacks linked to geopolitical events
  • Statistics on breaches, malware, and information theft

Who uses Strategic Threat Intelligence?

Strategic threat intelligence is intended for the C-suite. Chief information security officers (CISOs) use it to craft their security strategy and inform other executive stakeholders — even board members — of the most pressing threats to the organization and how they'll need to respond.

Strategic threat intelligence is delivered to this audience through reports and briefs (i.e., long-form writing) rather than feeds. It details:

  • Victimology, in terms of likely targets and attack trends
  • How attacker methodology is changing over time
  • Explains campaigns as related to geopolitical events

While strategic intelligence is most commonly used at the top of an organization, it also has a place lower down the corporate ladder. Strategic intelligence provides context to security teams working on proactive cyber defense as well as responding to attacks in real time. It can also be integrated with the security stack as we'll discuss in a later section.

How is Strategic Threat Intelligence Sourced?

Strategic intelligence is collected from many of the same sources as other types of cyber threat intelligence. The main difference that the intelligence product is less technical than other types and concerns a longer period of time.

Strategic threat intelligence comes from various sources, including:

  • Open sources on the public internet as well as the dark web
  • Government and NGO releases
  • Information sharing groups
  • Commercial intelligence feeds
  • Research groups

What is Strategic Threat Intelligence Used For?

Strategic threat intelligence is designed to inform executive leadership about high-risk threat actors, relevant risk scenarios, and exposures. It differs from other forms of cyber threat intelligence which include:

  • Technical threat intelligence: Technical intelligence is actionable information on IoCs used by security teams to detect, prevent and respond to attacks in real time.
  • Tactical threat intelligence: Tactical intelligence details specific TTPs and other threat actor resources to improve defenses and detection capabilities.
  • Operational threat intelligence: Operational intelligence provides insight into threat actor methodologies to expose potential risks and uncover new threats.

Below are some use cases that can shed light on how your business can start implementing strategic threat intelligence in your security program:

Risk Analysis

Organizations use strategic intelligence to perform thorough risk analyses and review their technology supply chain. This practice can surface potential threats and improve risk management. Strategic threat intelligence also sheds light on business activities that impact security posture, such as:

  • Business ventures (e.g., mergers and acquisitions)
  • Third-party relationships (e.g., vendors and partner organizations)
  • Installed technology

Planning for the Future

For executives and senior leadership tasked with shaping the future of their company, strategic threat intelligence is indispensable. It helps to guide security strategy and policy decisions, including:

  • Resource allocations
  • Defense prioritization
  • Investment decisions
  • Personnel training
  • Incident response planning

Integration with Security Tools

Even though strategic intelligence is more than raw threat data, it still is beneficial to integrate with your security stack. Strategic threat intelligence brings context to security information and event management systems (SIEM) and can be used to:

  • Shape correlation rule design
  • Improve incident prioritization
  • Build better alerting mechanisms and reduce false positives

Strategic threat intelligence can also be used to improve security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR)  capabilities. Organizations can improve automated workflows to align with their overall security strategy and long-term goals.

What Challenges Come With Adopting Strategic Threat Intelligence?

Strategic threat intelligence shares many of the same challenges as other forms of intelligence, but with an emphasis on analysis and contextualization.

Mining Context from the Data Mountain

All threat intelligence suffers from data overload. Thankfully, strategic intelligence isn't bogged down with details like IP addresses, domain names, file hashes, and lots of other technical info. But it still requires a ton of information, like being up on current events and the latest cyber news, and understanding highly secretive threat actors skilled at deception.

Pulling together vast and varied information takes time and resources, and deriving strategic intelligence from it takes even more. For organizations looking to harness the power of strategic threat intelligence, they have to agree that the "juice is worth the squeeze" and adhere to best practices for putting it to use.

Finding the Right Talent

The global cybersecurity skills gap is nothing new. Finding the right professionals to produce and disseminate strategic threat intelligence can be even harder, as it can can affect some of a company's biggest business decisions. They need to have in-depth knowledge of the threat landscape and how it impacts an organization's attack surface. But they also need to be adept communicators, putting threats in terms non-technical audiences can understand. And they need business sense to tie cyber issues to real-world impacts and a company's bottom line.

Separating Blips from Trends

Strategic threat intelligence comes with a unique challenge of identifying long-term, lasting trends in a constantly evolving threat landscape. Ignoring flashes in the pan and focusing on simmering campaigns, persistent threats, and geopolitical events (that may move at a glacial pace) can be difficult. Both businesses and cybersecurity can change fast, but allowing the slower nature of strategic intelligence to take shape will pay dividends through better quality insights and fewer missteps.

Anomali: Integrate Strategic Threat Intelligence With Your Program

Anomali ThreatStream provides access to the industry's largest global repository of curated threat intelligence — delivering enrichment, contextualization, and detection of known and emerging threats — tailored specifically to your organization.

Actionable Intelligence at the Ready

Defend against industry-specific threats with ready-to-use dashboards that provide immediate insights into threat actors, vulnerabilities, TTPs, campaigns, and a geolocation heatmap.

Hundreds of Threat Intelligence Feeds and Analysis Tools

Gain immediate access to an extensive ecosystem of third-party feeds, enrichment data, and tools. ThreatStream provides access to the world’s largest repository of curated threat intelligence, providing relevant, high-quality intelligence tailored to your location, industry, sector, and technology stack.

In-Depth Context and Threat Modeling

Immediately access detailed analyses of actors and campaigns. And get a clear visual view of global threats impacting your organization's security coverage, from indicators to high-level threat models, by easily searching and analyzing threat intelligence data.

Automated Distribution

Seamlessly share enriched threat intel across your entire security ecosystem to enable proactive blocking and monitoring of potential attacks, strengthen your security posture, and reduce risk.

See for Yourself

Hundreds of Fortune 1000 organizations trust Anomali ThreatStream to power their threat intelligence programs and keep decision makers on top of their most pressing threats. Schedule a demo to see how ThreatStream can transform intel into action.

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