Cyber Threat Intelligence: The No-Nonsense Guide for CISOs and Security Managers

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)