What is cyber threat intelligence?
In today's digital landscape, cyber threats emerge from countless directions. Every point where data is stored, accessed, transmitted, or manipulated represents a potential attack vector requiring protection against sophisticated actors.
The challenge lies in monitoring all data interfaces that could face threats, tracking detected breaches and attacks, and coordinating the various countermeasures, tools, and security activities deployed to protect these interfaces.
Cyber threat intelligence brings together this disparate information to identify hidden patterns and highlight critical attack vectors, enabling strategic protection strategies that safeguard your organization's digital assets.
Graph technology helps defend and mitigate against continually changing attack strategies and attack surfaces.
How cyber threat intelligence helps enterprises manage evolving threats
Strategic threat intelligence plays a central role in managing evolving threats by providing proactive, data-driven insights that enhance enterprise security posture and decision-making capabilities. A comprehensive cyber threat intelligence strategy delivers these key benefits:
Proactive threat detection and response
Enabling faster threat detection and response through continuous monitoring of networks and systems allows security teams to:
- Detect security incidents early and implement real-time threat intelligence updates
- Block malicious actors before cyber threats cause damage
- Empower incident response teams with tactical threat intelligence for fast and effective mitigation
Enhanced threat awareness and prioritization
Operational threat intelligence improves an organization's overall threat awareness by:
- Providing actionable threat intelligence based on current cybersecurity trends
- Focusing security team members on high-priority tasks requiring human analysis
- Prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities based on potential negative impacts using technical threat intelligence
Improved security operations
Cyber threat intelligence strengthens security operations by:
- Integrating and enhancing existing security tools to improve incident response
- Enabling proactive threat hunting to identify and address threats before they become a problem
- Automating repetitive tasks for more efficient and effective threat analysis
Financial and reputational protection
Implementing robust cyber threat intelligence helps organizations:
- Prevent financial losses through cyber threat prevention and cyber attack prevention
- Build client trust by maintaining strong cybersecurity measures and avoiding reputational damage
Graph technology in cyber threat intelligence:
How Tom Sawyer Software enhances security
Graph technology is revolutionizing cybersecurity by enabling organizations to map, analyze, and mitigate vulnerabilities across interconnected attack vectors with precision.
By modeling relationships between assets, users, vulnerabilities, and threats, graph databases and attack graphs provide dynamic, context-rich insights that traditional linear methods cannot match. Read on to learn how this approach transforms vulnerability management.
Relationship mapping for contextual analysis
Graph databases represent assets (devices, users), vulnerabilities, and attack paths as interconnected nodes and edges, revealing hidden dependencies. This digital twin of your enterprise network environment is critical to understanding and mitigating risks and delivers important contextual information to inform the results of automated artificial intelligence.
Attack-path simulation
Attack graphs model how adversaries exploit combinations of weaknesses. Make use of attack graphs to simulate threat campaigns that exploit a collection of weaknesses in turn (e.g., phishing → credential theft → lateral movement). Identify critical vulnerabilities in these attack paths that can disrupt multiple potential threats and prioritize them in your cyber security strategy.
Real-time threat detection
Streaming graph databases process live data to identify and alert analysts when anomalous behavior patterns emerge. Detect privilege escalations as they are occurring and stop them in their tracks. Recognize and correlate unusual network traffic to external IPs as part of a broader attack sequence that spans multiple on premise and cloud-based systems.
AI-driven prioritization
Enhance AI/ML models with structured relationship data for more relevant results. Predict high-risk vulnerabilities based on exploitability across connected appliances in your network. Automate risk scoring by analyzing how vulnerabilities interconnect within the wider environment, within and beyond your firewalls, and based on potential business impact.
Continuous attack surface mapping
Graph databases auto-update as networks evolve, maintaining real-time visibility into shadow assets, user account privileges, and misconfigured cloud resources. Recognize the presence of new devices and users and suspicious patterns of connection and data traffic.
Explainable threat hunting
Facilitate compliance and audit processes by demonstrating a clear understanding of threat detection logic with analyses that trace incidents back to specific unpatched vulnerabilities. When security teams have clear and accurate explanations for cyber security detections, organizations can more confidently act on alerts, reduce false positives, and improve overall security posture.
Situation Awareness
A digital twin provides comprehensive context needed to accurately analyze and visualize conditions across your network through threat intelligence visualization.
Document and Track
Digital twins document known network information while analytics identify suspicious connections through cybersecurity intelligence sharing.
Threat Assessment
Digital twins help assess severity and scope of potential threats, enabling appropriate isolation and mitigation actions through cyber threat modeling.
Visualizations for human comprehension
Digital twins help cyber experts immediately orient to attack locations and potential propagation paths. Node-entity graphs help users trace paths, recognize network choke points, and identify configuration anomalies through effective threat intelligence visualization.
Good visualizations help security teams understand and validate recommendations made by AI-based cybersecurity intelligence tools.
Algorithmic accuracy and network relevance
The context of a digital twin informs analytics and reduces the number of false alarms due to noise or irrelevance.
Shared context also means that weak signals from different sources that are clustered on one node are more likely to be recognized as a potential threat.
Graph-based approaches support the integration of many facts from different sources into a single, fully contextualized digital twin, where the relevance and validity of individual data points can be more readily identified.
A shared telephone number gathers otherwise unrelated events in the same context.
Real-world applications of graph technology in cyber threat intelligence
Network security monitoring and analysis
Graph technology enhances network security monitoring by correlating events across different systems and protocols, revealing attack campaigns that might appear as isolated incidents in traditional SIEM tools.
Advanced persistent threat (APT) detection
APTs often involve multiple stages and techniques over extended time periods. Graph databases excel at linking these disparate activities into recognizable patterns, even when they occur weeks or months apart.
Insider threat detection
By mapping relationships between users, data access patterns, and behavioral indicators, graph technology helps identify potential insider threats that might otherwise go undetected.
Supply chain risk assessment
Cyber threats can enter your most vulnerable systems through your most trusted partners. Graph databases model complex relationships between vendors, systems, and data flows, highlighting potential security risks in your extended supply chain and third-party ecosystem.
Identity and access management oversight
Graph technology provides visibility into access privilege patterns, helping identify excessive permissions or unusual access requests that might indicate compromised accounts.
Forensic investigation and incident response
Graph technologies can reconstruct and visualize attack timelines through temporal graph visualization and root cause analysis, including the identification of lateral movement patterns across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. This makes it easier for analysts to determine the scope and impact of incidents, prioritize response, and communicate findings to stakeholders.
Example of graph technology in action
Bridge detection is one tool for identifying threat propagation paths in a compromised network.
Suppose an attacker compromises a low-privilege account via a phishing email. A graph-based system can:
- Instantly map all systems, files, and users connected to that account.
- Simulate potential lateral movement paths the attacker could take.
- Alert analysts to unusual access attempts or privilege escalations.
- Prioritize patching or isolation of the most at-risk assets based on their connectivity and criticality.
Perspectives enables real-time threat response
Tom Sawyer Perspectives delivers the visualization and analysis capabilities essential for proactive threat intelligence:
- Live data integration pipelines that process and visualize threat data as it emerges.
- Alert visualization that transforms complex data into immediately actionable insights.
- Interactive exploration interfaces that enable analysts to rapidly investigate anomalies.
- Temporal analysis tools for tracking attack progression through your network.
What are threat intelligence feeds?
Threat intelligence feeds provide real-time updates about global cyber threats. These third-party services collate information about active cyber threats and trends so that your cyber defenses can effectively protect against the latest attack strategies.
Threat intelligence feeds provide information about:
- Malware, viruses and botnets
- Zero-day vulnerabilities
- Attack techniques and tactics
- Indications of attacks, such as bad file hashes and specific suspicious IP addresses
- Information about the people and organizations behind attacks, and their motivations/targets