Building An Intelligence Led Security Program

As recently as five years ago, securing a network meant putting in a firewall, intrusion detection system, and installing antivirus software on the desktop. Unfortunately, attackers have grown more nimble and effective, meaning that traditional security programs are no longer effective. Today's effective cyber security programs take these best practices and overlay them with intelligence. Adding cyber threat intelligence can help security teams uncover events not detected by traditional security platforms and correlate seemingly disparate events across the network. Properly-implemented intelligence also makes the life of the security practitioner easier by helping him more effectively prioritize and respond to security incidents. The problem with current efforts is that many security practitioners don't know how to properly implement an intelligence-led program, or are afraid that it is out of their budget. Building an Intelligence-Led Security Program is the first book to show how to implement an intelligence-led program in your enterprise on any budget. It will show you how to implement a security information a security information and event management system, collect and analyze logs, and how to practice real cyber threat intelligence. You'll learn how to understand your network in-depth so that you can protect it in the best possible way. Provides a roadmap and direction on how to build an intelligence-led information security program to protect your company. Learn how to understand your network through logs and client monitoring, so you can effectively evaluate threat intelligence. Learn how to use popular tools such as BIND, SNORT, squid, STIX, TAXII, CyBox, and splunk to conduct network intelligence.

Intelligence-Led Security: How to Understand, Justify and Implement a New Approach to Security is a concise review of the concept of Intelligence-Led Security. Protecting a business, including its information and intellectual property, physical infrastructure, employees, and reputation, has become increasingly difficult. Online threats come from all sides: internal leaks and external adversaries; domestic hacktivists and overseas cybercrime syndicates; targeted threats and mass attacks. And these threats run the gamut from targeted to indiscriminate to entirely accidental. Among thought leaders and advanced organizations, the consensus is now clear. Defensive security measures: antivirus software, firewalls, and other technical controls and post-attack mitigation strategies are no longer sufficient. To adequately protect company assets and ensure business continuity, organizations must be more proactive. Increasingly, this proactive stance is being summarized by the phrase Intelligence-Led Security: the use of data to gain insight into what can happen, who is likely to be involved, how they are likely to attack and, if possible, to predict when attacks are likely to come. In this book, the authors review the current threat-scape and why it requires this new approach, offer a clarifying definition of what Cyber Threat Intelligence is, describe how to communicate its value to business, and lay out concrete steps toward implementing Intelligence-Led Security. Learn how to create a proactive strategy for digital security Use data analysis and threat forecasting to predict and prevent attacks before they start Understand the fundamentals of today's threatscape and how best to organize your defenses

Using a well-conceived incident response plan in the aftermath of an online security breach enables your team to identify attackers and learn how they operate. But, only when you approach incident response with a cyber threat intelligence mindset will you truly understand the value of that information. With this practical guide, you’ll learn the fundamentals of intelligence analysis, as well as the best ways to incorporate these techniques into your incident response process. Each method reinforces the other: threat intelligence supports and augments incident response, while incident response generates useful threat intelligence. This book helps incident managers, malware analysts, reverse engineers, digital forensics specialists, and intelligence analysts understand, implement, and benefit from this relationship. In three parts, this in-depth book includes: The fundamentals: get an introduction to cyber threat intelligence, the intelligence process, the incident-response process, and how they all work together Practical application: walk through the intelligence-driven incident response (IDIR) process using the F3EAD process—Find, Fix Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate The way forward: explore big-picture aspects of IDIR that go beyond individual incident-response investigations, including intelligence team building

Understand the process of setting up a successful cyber threat intelligence (CTI) practice within an established security team. This book shows you how threat information that has been collected, evaluated, and analyzed is a critical component in protecting your organization’s resources. Adopting an intelligence-led approach enables your organization to nimbly react to situations as they develop. Security controls and responses can then be applied as soon as they become available, enabling prevention rather than response. There are a lot of competing approaches and ways of working, but this book cuts through the confusion. Author Aaron Roberts introduces the best practices and methods for using CTI successfully. This book will help not only senior security professionals, but also those looking to break into the industry. You will learn the theories and mindset needed to be successful in CTI. This book covers the cybersecurity wild west, the merits and limitations of structured intelligence data, and how using structured intelligence data can, and should, be the standard practice for any intelligence team. You will understand your organizations’ risks, based on the industry and the adversaries you are most likely to face, the importance of open-source intelligence (OSINT) to any CTI practice, and discover the gaps that exist with your existing commercial solutions and where to plug those gaps, and much more. What You Will Learn Know the wide range of cybersecurity products and the risks and pitfalls aligned with blindly working with a vendor Understand critical intelligence concepts such as the intelligence cycle, setting intelligence requirements, the diamond model, and how to apply intelligence to existing security information Understand structured intelligence (STIX) and why it’s important, and aligning STIX to ATT&CK and how structured intelligence helps improve final intelligence reporting Know how to approach CTI, depending on your budget Prioritize areas when it comes to funding and the best approaches to incident response, requests for information, or ad hoc reporting Critically evaluate services received from your existing vendors, including what they do well, what they don’t do well (or at all), how you can improve on this, the things you should consider moving in-house rather than outsourcing, and the benefits of finding and maintaining relationships with excellent vendors Who This Book Is For Senior security leaders in charge of cybersecurity teams who are considering starting a threat intelligence team, those considering a career change into cyber threat intelligence (CTI) who want a better understanding of the main philosophies and ways of working in the industry, and security professionals with no prior intelligence experience but have technical proficiency in other areas (e.g., programming, security architecture, or engineering)

This book is written for the first security hire in an organization, either an individual moving into this role from within the organization or hired into the role. More and more, organizations are realizing that information security requires a dedicated team with leadership distinct from information technology, and often the people who are placed into those positions have no idea where to start or how to prioritize. There are many issues competing for their attention, standards that say do this or do that, laws, regulations, customer demands, and no guidance on what is actually effective. This book offers guidance on approaches that work for how you prioritize and build a comprehensive information security program that protects your organization. While most books targeted at information security professionals explore specific subjects with deep expertise, this book explores the depth and breadth of the field. Instead of exploring a technology such as cloud security or a technique such as risk analysis, this book places those into the larger context of how to meet an organization's needs, how to prioritize, and what success looks like. Guides to the maturation of practice are offered, along with pointers for each topic on where to go for an in-depth exploration of each topic. Unlike more typical books on information security that advocate a single perspective, this book explores competing perspectives with an eye to providing the pros and cons of the different approaches and the implications of choices on implementation and on maturity, as often a choice on an approach needs to change as an organization grows and matures.

Drawing upon years of practical experience and using numerous examples and illustrative case studies, Threat Forecasting: Leveraging Big Data for Predictive Analysis discusses important topics, including the danger of using historic data as the basis for predicting future breaches, how to use security intelligence as a tool to develop threat forecasting techniques, and how to use threat data visualization techniques and threat simulation tools. Readers will gain valuable security insights into unstructured big data, along with tactics on how to use the data to their advantage to reduce risk. Presents case studies and actual data to demonstrate threat data visualization techniques and threat simulation tools Explores the usage of kill chain modelling to inform actionable security intelligence Demonstrates a methodology that can be used to create a full threat forecast analysis for enterprise networks of any size