Cyber Threat Intelligence

The term intelligence has its origin in the military jargon. Intelligence is actionable and context-related information created by gathering, proceeding, and analyzing data [1]. Cyber Threat Intelligence in this context is understood as evidence-based knowledge about existing and emerging threats [2]. Cyber Threat Intelligence can analyze how threat actors behave in the digital world to achieve their malicious goals [1]. Examples for CTI are the so-called Indicator of Compromise (IOC) or Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). IOCs are simple information like IP addresses, hash values, or web domains. More complex information about the behavior of threat actors like the used techniques and tactics are called TTPs [1]. There are several norms for the representation of CTI, whereby STIX has established itself as the unspoken standard. There are various options for procuring CTI, such as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Likewise, an exchange between two or more parties within a sharing community can be used to procure CTI. In this case, sharing platforms like MISP are used for procurement or exchange.

CTI can help to mitigate cyber attacks or even prevent potential attacks. However, research agrees that CTI has specific weaknesses. For example, inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated CTI poses a significant challenge [3, 4]. Therefore, the quality of CTI is a crucial factor in the success of the exchange and its actions [5, 6, 7].

Literature

• 1 Scott J. Roberts and Rebekah Brown., Intelligence-Driven Incident Response Outwitting the Adversary (1st. ed.). O’Reilly Media, Inc. (2017)
• 2 https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/2487216/definition-threat-intelligence
• 3 Ponemon Institute LLC. Live threat intelligence impact report 2013 (2013). https://www.ponemon.org/blog/live-threatintelligence-impact-report-2013-1
• 4 Ring, T., Threat intelligence Why people don’t share. Comput. Fraud Secur. (2014)
• 5 Sillaber, C., Sauerwein, C., Mussmann, A., Breu, R. Data quality challenges and future research directions in threat intelligence sharing practice. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Workshop on Information Sharing and Collaborative Security - WISCS’16, pp. 65–70. ACM, New York (2016)
• 6 Sillaber, C., Sauerwein, C., Mussmann, A., Breu, R., Towards a maturity model for inter-organizational cyber threat intelligence sharing, A case study of stakeholder’s expectations and willingness to share. In Proceedings of Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI 2018), pp. 6–9. Springer, Heidelberg (2018)
• 7 Tounsi, W., Rais, H. A survey on technical threat intelligence in the age of sophisticated cyber attacks. Comput. Secur. 72, 212–233 (2018)