Cyber Threat Intelligence

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

Threat intelligence is a surprisingly complex topic that goes far beyond the obvious technical challenges of collecting, modelling and sharing technical indicators. Most books in this area focus mainly on technical measures to harden a system based on threat intel data and limit their scope to single organizations only. This book provides a unique angle on the topic of national cyber threat intelligence and security information sharing. It also provides a clear view on ongoing works in research laboratories world-wide in order to address current security concerns at national level. It allows practitioners to learn about upcoming trends, researchers to share current results, and decision makers to prepare for future developments.

This book provides readers with up-to-date research of emerging cyber threats and defensive mechanisms, which are timely and essential. It covers cyber threat intelligence concepts against a range of threat actors and threat tools (i.e. ransomware) in cutting-edge technologies, i.e., Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing and mobile devices. This book also provides the technical information on cyber-threat detection methods required for the researcher and digital forensics experts, in order to build intelligent automated systems to fight against advanced cybercrimes. The ever increasing number of cyber-attacks requires the cyber security and forensic specialists to detect, analyze and defend against the cyber threats in almost real-time, and with such a large number of attacks is not possible without deeply perusing the attack features and taking corresponding intelligent defensive actions – this in essence defines cyber threat intelligence notion. However, such intelligence would not be possible without the aid of artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced data mining techniques to collect, analyze, and interpret cyber-attack campaigns which is covered in this book. This book will focus on cutting-edge research from both academia and industry, with a particular emphasis on providing wider knowledge of the field, novelty of approaches, combination of tools and so forth to perceive reason, learn and act on a wide range of data collected from different cyber security and forensics solutions. This book introduces the notion of cyber threat intelligence and analytics and presents different attempts in utilizing machine learning and data mining techniques to create threat feeds for a range of consumers. Moreover, this book sheds light on existing and emerging trends in the field which could pave the way for future works. The inter-disciplinary nature of this book, makes it suitable for a wide range of audiences with backgrounds in artificial intelligence, cyber security, forensics, big data and data mining, distributed systems and computer networks. This would include industry professionals, advanced-level students and researchers that work within these related fields.

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 presents the outcomes of the 2019 International Conference on Cyber Security Intelligence and Analytics (CSIA2019), an international conference dedicated to promoting novel theoretical and applied research advances in the interdisciplinary field of cyber security, particularly focusing on threat intelligence, analytics, and countering cyber crime. The conference provides a forum for presenting and discussing innovative ideas, cutting-edge research findings, and novel techniques, methods and applications on all aspects of Cyber Security Intelligence and Analytics.

Get to grips with cyber threat intelligence and data-driven threat hunting while exploring expert tips and techniques Key Features Set up an environment to centralize all data in an Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) server that enables threat hunting Carry out atomic hunts to start the threat hunting process and understand the environment Perform advanced hunting using MITRE ATT&CK Evals emulations and Mordor datasets Book DescriptionThreat hunting (TH) provides cybersecurity analysts and enterprises with the opportunity to proactively defend themselves by getting ahead of threats before they can cause major damage to their business. This book is not only an introduction for those who don’t know much about the cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and TH world, but also a guide for those with more advanced knowledge of other cybersecurity fields who are looking to implement a TH program from scratch. You will start by exploring what threat intelligence is and how it can be used to detect and prevent cyber threats. As you progress, you’ll learn how to collect data, along with understanding it by developing data models. The book will also show you how to set up an environment for TH using open source tools. Later, you will focus on how to plan a hunt with practical examples, before going on to explore the MITRE ATT&CK framework. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills you need to be able to carry out effective hunts in your own environment.What you will learn Understand what CTI is, its key concepts, and how it is useful for preventing threats and protecting your organization Explore the different stages of the TH process Model the data collected and understand how to document the findings Simulate threat actor activity in a lab environment Use the information collected to detect breaches and validate the results of your queries Use documentation and strategies to communicate processes to senior management and the wider business Who this book is for If you are looking to start out in the cyber intelligence and threat hunting domains and want to know more about how to implement a threat hunting division with open-source tools, then this cyber threat intelligence book is for you.

This book describes techniques and results in cyber threat intelligence from the center of the malicious hacking underworld - the dark web.