Leveraging Threat Information Sharing For Operational Collaboration in Cybersecurity

By Cyware Labs Inc.

Cyber threat intelligence sharing is about identifying the indicators of compromise (IoCs) or threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) around cyberattacks, malware, vulnerabilities, and attack campaigns, and formulating strategies to mitigate those threats. By learning from the security measures implemented by peer organizations, security teams can better prepare for potential threats.

Collaboration for collective security upsides

Information sharing in cybersecurity is not just limited to information about an actual cyber threat, but also sharing best practices, various defensive approaches, attacker analysis, and more, that can help organizations strengthen their security postures against today’s cybercriminals.

Information sharing lays the foundation for a collective defense mindset that benefits from actionable intelligence shared by various stakeholders for efficient decision-making. It also helps organizations improve security risk management by automating threat response through external collaboration and sharing learnings.

Putting contextual intelligence at play

Information-sharing can be conducted in a more structured and meaningful manner through sectoral sharing networks like ISACs or ISAOs. An information-sharing community like the Faith-Based Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (FB-ISAO) serves as a central hub for sectoral intelligence to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from security incidents arising from all potential threats, thereby ensuring the resilience and continuity of the community assets.

An information-sharing community can provide detailed and contextualized threat intelligence to its member organizations to help them better anticipate and identify malicious activity and take intelligence-driven actions for rapid detection and response against various threats.

Threat intelligence gained from information sharing and security collaboration helps organizations make strategic, operational, and tactical decisions by collating insights from multiple sources to discover and eliminate their security blind spots and weaknesses.

Expanding sharing capabilities

Cyware helps broaden the horizons of information-sharing programs for a number of industry-specific sharing communities (ISACs/ISAOs) across the globe. Cyware’s threat intelligence sharing and operationalization solutions are designed to help security teams automate their intel ingestion, analysis, scoring, dissemination, alerting, and actioning in real-time to protect their assets.

Cyware’s solutions help organizations climb up the ladder of security maturity by first automating threat intel operationalization of aggregated, enriched threat information

gained from multiple internal and external sources including deployed security tools, commercial intel providers, industry peers, ISACs/ISAOs, and CERTs. On top of this, Cyware helps facilitate threat intel collaboration through automated scoring, analysis, and actioning of external intel, as well as internal sharing and real-time alerting capabilities.

Lastly, organizations use Cyware’s threat intelligence sharing solutions to collaborate with external partners and sharing communities to implement the best mitigation strategies for various threats. Cyware offers support for STIX/TAXII-based bi-directional intel sharing and collaboration,  along with other widely used industry standards. Cyware is also stretching the boundaries of information-sharing by providing a solution for building a global, cross-sectoral ISAC-to-ISAC intel sharing network with last-mile automation.

Key takeaway

Information sharing helps improve an organization’s security posture through shared situational awareness. Threat intel collaboration further unlocks the doors to building a collective defense network of organizations learning from each other by exchanging threat intelligence and benefitting from the community’s collective insights and capabilities to counter the most relevant cyber threats. Therefore, threat intelligence sharing is a critical tool for organizations in today’s threat landscape and Cyware is helping security teams make the most out of it to enhance cybersecurity for all through collaboration.