Moving Toward a Framework for Resilient Cybersecurity: Evaluating the Threat Landscape

In this previous post on The Need for a Framework for Resilient Cybersecurity we highlighted that the increasing diversity and sophistication of today’s IT environments is driving a need for organizations to implement a framework for resilient cybersecurity. In this post we will focus on one of the critical components of this framework: Threat Intelligence.

Today’s threat landscape is vast and evolving rapidly. Threat actors are constantly changing their tactics to sidestep defenses, and leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities and compromised endpoints to subvert secure perimeters. The dynamic nature of the threat landscape, coupled with the diversity and complexity of IT environments, has made it impossible for organizations to mitigate every potential threat and patch every security vulnerability. As organizations expand their infrastructure from on-premise systems to cloud services and eventually to hybrid architectures their attack surface increases along with their risk profile.

So how do organizations keep up with the pace of threats?

The best way to keep up with threats is to continually evaluate the threat landscape. In a diverse application environment, it is important to constantly reevaluate risks to identify gaps that may have arisen due to the dynamic shifts in systems and services. To help evaluate threat vulnerabilities, organizations must continuously ask and answer four basic questions:

According to the cybersecurity professionals on Verisign’s Security Services team notes, “The first step to architecting a resilient defense is to understand threats in context to protect resources accordingly.” Achieving this requires that organizations gain access to relevant and actionable threat intelligence, and have the capability to identify the mission goals and relationships among threat elements.

Threat intelligence provides organizations with the information needed to make smarter, data driven decisions about protecting the availability and integrity of sensitive information and assets. The integration of threat intelligence into the cybersecurity framework enables organizations to anticipate the moves of their adversary, detect attacks early on, rapidly neutralize threats, and dynamically prioritize mitigation efforts. Organizations using security intelligence are able to improve operational efficiency by enabling automation and providing detailed threat information allowing teams to focus on a smaller number of real threats.

The cost of not integrating threat intelligence into security operations is significant and growing, driven by the increasingly sophisticated, stealthy and dangerous cybersecurity threats facing every organization. Stay tuned for our next post on designing and organization’s framework for security and flexibility.

CTA: To receive an overview of key cybersecurity trends, download the 2016 Cyberthreats and Trends Report from Verisign iDefense® Security Intelligence. – http://goo.gl/f5KmlB

 

This post was written by Cognitio and sponsored by Verisign.  Contact Us  for information on sponsoring content of your own.