Pandemic sees organizations of all sizes and industries invest in cyber threat intelligence (CTI)>
Beta News – Anthony Perridge
The 2021 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence survey, sponsored by ThreatQuotient, explores the state of play in the global use of CTI and outlines why the difficulties of the past year have contributed to the continued growth and maturity of CTI. The 2021 survey saw the number of respondents reporting they produce or consume intelligence rise by 7 percent, more notably, this was the first time the number of respondents without plans to consume or produce intelligence was 0 percent, down from 5.5 percent in 2020. Analyzed CTI helps organizations understand the capabilities, opportunities, and intent of adversaries conducting malicious cyber activities. Almost 20 percent of respondents indicated their implementation of CTI changed as a result of the pandemic, as adversaries took advantage of the disruption, with a sharp rise in COVID-related phishing and ransomware attacks targeting organizations across all industries. The mass shift towards remote working expanded the attack surface of organizations, as employees left the confines of their organizationsâ cyber protections. CTI is no longer perceived as just being for the top 1 percent of organizations, rather, providing value for mid-to-large organizations across a range of industries, with Cybersecurity, Banking & Finance, Government and Technology the leading industries represented in the surveyâs responses. Findings revealed a substantive shift in the number of organizations recognizing the benefits of CTI, and as being worth the investment, in aiding their ability to make tactical and strategic cyber response decisions. In response to questions on the use, value and inhibitors of CTI, 77 percent of those surveyed said CTI improved their detection and response capabilities, 78 percent labelled CTI data and information as being leveraged to detect threats and attacks, with 70 percent using CTI in helping to blocking threats and 66 percent for supporting their incident response.

The growth of CTIâs use amongst organizations of all sizes is demonstrated in both the 85 percent of respondents saying they already use CTI and 15 percent who do not “yet but plan to”, with 24 percent of respondents working in organizations with under 500 employees and 47 percent in companies of less than 5,000 employees. As CTI tools and processes are becoming more automated, analysts are able to spend more time working on more important and engaging activities, rather than mundane collection and processing tasks. With the demand higher than ever on CTI analysts to integrate or process more information from government sources into their analysis, and processing often the most automation relevant task, there is a widespread organizational need for better CTI tools and processes that support analysis and help identify misleading information that may skew impact analysis. While 65 percent of respondents reported they were overall satisfied with the automation and integration of CTI information with detection and response systems, an increase on the 2020 surveyâs 62 percent, while almost half of respondents (45 percent) identified a lack of automation or interoperability issues as inhibiting their organizations from implementing CTI effectively. The importance of automation is further compounded by the shortage in trained staff, which continues to be one of the biggest obstacles to the implementation of CTI, according to 53 percent of respondents. The survey also found that the trend toward hybrid-model teams over the past 5 years has shifted back, with organizations taking charge in the management of their CTI functions, with in-house teams growing 5 percent from 2020 to 37 percent, and hybrid models decreasing 5 percent from 2020, to 56 percent in 2020. almost 50 percent increase of respondents saying they are a part of an ISAC or other government intel sharing group since last year. The report found information security practitioners are seeing the value in interacting with ISACs with 69 percent of respondents saying CTI provided them with timely and relevant threat information. However, most notably, the survey found increases in three specific areas in intel sharing: advocacy in the community for security (50 percent), member meetups and events (50 percent), and training & conferences (47 percent).
Link: https://betanews.com/2021/02/24/organizations-invest-in-cti/