5 Threat Intelligence Trends

We’re living in a world where technology advances at a breathtaking pace, and cybercriminals are always looking for the latest ways to target organizations and individuals alike. In such a turbulent digital transformation, security experts need to keep up with the latest trends and address the latest potential threats in innovative ways.

The world of cyber security is an incredibly fast-moving sector, with both security providers and hackers trying to constantly outsmart each other. Simply put, it’s a constant cycle of coming up with new attack strategies and threats while trying to find new and innovative ways to combat them or eradicate them before they gain more ground.

In such a landscape, cyber threat intelligence experts constantly need to follow the latest threat trends and analyze the latest technological advancements to uncover weak spots before attackers do. In this article, we will aim to highlight the latest trends cyber threat intelligence experts are currently keeping an eye on.

What Are the Types of Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence can be put into four different categories which are:

• Strategic: Strategic threat intelligence mostly aims to provide insight regarding system risks and vulnerabilities within an organization’s digital landscape while aiming to provide preventive actions, identifying threat actors, their goals, and the likelihood of their attacks. This intelligence is less technical, aiming to drive high-level strategies based on data.
• Technical: This category focuses on evidence or clues of an attack to set up a base for analyzing said attack. Experts actively scan for IOCs (indicators of compromise) and aim to set up how the attack went down. After gathering all the data, experts should share it as quickly as possible.
• Tactical: This threat intelligence type focuses on uncovering attack vectors that help cyber threat intelligence experts devise a defense strategy. Tactical reports highlight security system vulnerabilities that hackers can potentially attack. These reports aim to strengthen existing defense protocols while also eradicating network vulnerabilities.
• Operational: This category prioritizes analyzing the attacks themselves. It aims to give detailed insight on different factors such as the nature of the attack, the timing, motive, and how the entire attack was carried out. In most cases, experts gather the info from hacker chat platforms through infiltration. This is a highly difficult approach since hackers usually communicate through encrypted channels, with limited access, not to mention, they may also use specific jargon, which makes “cracking the code” even harder.

What Are the 3 Types of Threat Intelligence Data?

The different threat intelligence data types can be grouped in similar categories as threat intelligence types:

• Strategic: This is also more or less non-technical data that aims to shed more light on the motivations of threats and the latest accompanying trends. Strategic data mostly focuses on the reasons behind an attack and means to uncover who’s behind the threats.
• Tactical: This data shows where the attacks took place and how. The latter gathers info about tactics, procedures, and techniques, while the first relates to threat hunting.
• Operational: This category showcases indicators of compromise. It gathers info on machine-readable data, like file names, domain names, hashes, URLs, IP addresses.

5 Threat Trends

According to the latest expert assessments, these trends are among the most concerning in terms of cyber security:

Remote Working Risks

The pandemic pushed a lot of companies to shift to a remote work model, posing several cybersecurity risks for business systems. Home offices are generally easier to attack than centralized systems. The latter usually has stronger firewalls, more secure routers, and better access management protocols. And, as companies rushed to set up home-based systems and keep things operational, they might not have been so rigorous about security and defense protocols. Workers may use both personal and professional devices to take care of work-related tasks, risking sensitive organizational information getting into the hands of hackers.

Cloud Service Security

Cloud vulnerability is still among the most prominent threats and the wide adaptation of these services (accelerated by the pandemic) gives hackers new opportunities to infiltrate previously well-secured systems. While cloud services offer several benefits for organizations, misconfigured cloud settings can lead to horrific data breaches. As such, organizations need to take several steps to secure their cloud protocols. Weak passwords, unauthorized access, potential entry points, personal device misuse, cloud migration difficulties, and unsecured networks are only some of the problems experts and organizations need to address.

Data Privacy

Data privacy has become a major hot topic even outside the field of cyber security. As several high-profile attacks managed to expose millions of personal information records and the introduction of data laws like GDPR in the EU, data privacy should be prioritized across the digital landscape. Those organizations that fail to comply with these regulations can end up paying massive fines, lose customer trust, and a nose-dive in reputation.

Mobile Cybersecurity

Mobile has been gaining more ground with each passing year, and with the introduction of remote working trends, even more, users are turning to mobile. People who work from home often switch between more than two devices, using public Wi-Fi hotspots and remote collab software. These trends open new possibilities for hackers who can design specific spyware that cracks encrypted messaging apps, Android devices, and more. Generally speaking, mobile security is a broad and difficult topic since it addresses different areas like network security, cloud computing, back-end security, wearables, and even automotive devices. So, when organizations are looking for options to protect their networks and applications, they should also consider mobile as a possible issue that may complicate things, requiring additional security layers.

Artificial Intelligence

While AI has brought a myriad of different advancements to the world of cyber security, helping experts with gathering data, threat detection, monitoring, and implementing intricate protocols, it also managed to give cybercriminals the opportunity to automate their own attacks. Also, artificial intelligence enabled them to use model-stealing and data-poisoning protocols on organizational AI defense systems. As artificial intelligence evolves, the technology will surely give security professionals more opportunities to create even more sophisticated defensive strategies. However, AI development can also give hackers a chance to improve their attacks, making them even harder to foresee and detect,

Conclusion

We’re living in a world where technology advances at a breathtaking pace, and cybercriminals are always looking for the latest ways to target organizations and individuals alike. In such a turbulent digital transformation, security experts need to keep up with the latest trends and address the latest potential threats in innovative ways.