Every seasoned professional knows that effective cybersecurity rests on knowledge. You cannot counter attacks unless you know how they work and what they target. That’s why enterprises rely on cyber threat intelligence that delivers essential insights to power their security decisions. Here is how it drives proactive defense, alert triage, and incident response.
What Is Cyber Threat Intelligence?
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) is actionable data about cyber threats, including their tactics, indicators, and wider context. CTI enables proactive defense by helping SOC teams identify emerging threats before they strike. It reveals attackers’ infrastructure, such as phishing domains or malicious IPs, allowing businesses to detect, prioritize, and mitigate attacks.
ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup is one of the widely used CTI services. It contains extensive data about the latest attacks on more than 15,000 organizations worldwide. It provides professionals with access to a searchable database of over 40 different types of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), Attack (IOAs), and Behavior (IOBs) to help them uncover essential context about threats they are facing.
Proactive Defense
One of the core responsibilities of any security team is to minimize the risk of potential attacks. CTI is extremely helpful here, as it helps enrich detection tools and systems with up-to-date threat data, improving their ability to block threats. Here are the main benefits it offers:
- Early Threat Detection: Identifies vulnerabilities and attack vectors before exploitation.
- Improved Preparedness: Informs security policies and training to counter specific threats.
- Reduced Attack Surface: Enables preemptive blocking of malicious IPs and domains.
For example, using ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup, teams often search for information about threats targeting businesses in their country. Let’s take a closer look at this query:
TI Lookup also lists malicious domains used in stealer attacks on Colombian businesses
It scans TI Lookup’s database and identifies stealers targeting Colombian companies via email files. The search results reveal more than 130 sandbox analyses of threats fitting the description along with network indicators (IPs, domains, URLs) associated with these malicious samples.
Just a quick look allows us to see that companies in Colombia are being targeted with the Agent Tesla malware via phishing emails. We can proceed to view each attack in detail by clicking on any of the sandbox reports.
The critical insights gathered from this search can be used by SOC teams to better protect their organizations and prepare defenses against similar threats in the future.
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Alert Triage
CTI streamlines alert triage by adding context to separate critical threats from noise. Security teams face hundreds of alerts daily, and CTI correlates indicators with known attack patterns, cutting down manual investigation time. This ensures high-risk threats are prioritized, optimizing resource allocation. Here are some of the benefits of CTI for Alert Triage:
- Faster Prioritization: Highlights alerts tied to known malicious activity.
- Fewer False Positives: Validates alerts with threat context, reducing wasted effort.
- Efficient Resource Use: Focuses team efforts on high-impact threats.
ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup supports alert triage professionals by offering fast searches to check if a certain indicator is indeed malicious. Let’s try submitting the following request to TI Lookup:
destinationIP:”176.113.115.6″
TI Lookup indicates that the IP address is malicious
The results clearly show that this IP address belongs to the Amadey malware.
Apart from the verdict, we can also gather extra domains and view entire sandbox sessions where this IP was logged.
Incident Response
CTI enhances incident response by providing detailed attack insights for swift containment and recovery. It maps threat behavior, identifies compromised systems, and traces attacker infrastructure, enabling targeted mitigation. This reduces downtime and limits financial or reputational harm. The benefits of CTI for Incident Response include:
- Rapid Threat Identification: Pinpoints the attack’s source and scope.
- Targeted Mitigation: Guides precise actions to isolate and neutralize threats.
- Minimized Impact: Speeds up recovery to reduce operational and financial losses.
Coming back to the IP address we checked during our alert triage, we can dive deeper into the sandbox sessions where it was detected.
ANY.RUN’s Interactive Sandbox gives in-depth analysis of the threats found via TI Lookup
Sandbox analysis shows us the attack’s scope, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), network activity, and other essential pieces of forensic evidence that we can use to contain the infection in our own infrastructure.
Conclusion
Cyber threat intelligence drives proactive defense, efficient alert triage, and rapid incident response. ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup provides essential data to counter threats effectively.
- Accelerate triage and threat identification: Uncover attacks behind alerts with quick indicator search to block them before they escalate.
- Improve incident response: Collect attack IOCs, IOAs, IOBs, TTPs, and observe its full execution inside the sandbox for more accurate response.
- Simplify threat hunting: Run proactive searches on indicators found in your network to pin them to actual threats.
Contact ANY.RUN to request trial access to TI Lookup for your team.
The post Why Modern Businesses Need Cyber Threat Intelligence first appeared on Cybersecurity Insiders.
The post Why Modern Businesses Need Cyber Threat Intelligence appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.