How do you use threat intelligence and threat modeling to anticipate and prepare for emerging threats?

1 What is threat intelligence?

Threat intelligence is the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about current and potential cyber threats, such as actors, tactics, techniques, procedures, indicators, and vulnerabilities. Threat intelligence can help you understand the threat landscape, identify trends and patterns, and prioritize your actions based on the level of risk and impact. Threat intelligence can come from various sources, such as open-source, commercial, government, or internal data. You can use threat intelligence to inform your decision-making, enhance your situational awareness, and improve your incident response.

2 What is threat modeling?

Threat modeling is the process of identifying, analyzing, and evaluating the possible threats to your network, assets, and data. Threat modeling can help you map out your attack surface, discover potential weaknesses, and design countermeasures to reduce or eliminate the threats. Threat modeling can be done at different stages of the network lifecycle, such as during design, development, testing, deployment, or operation. Threat modeling can use various frameworks, methods, and tools, such as STRIDE, DREAD, PASTA, or Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool.

3 How do they work together?

Threat intelligence and threat modeling are complementary methods that can enhance your network security posture. Threat intelligence provides valuable insights and context about external threats, while threat modeling assesses internal vulnerabilities and risks. Combining the two allows you to gain a comprehensive view of your security situation, align objectives with business goals, identify and prioritize threats, develop proactive security controls, and monitor changes in the threat landscape. Doing so will ensure that your security posture is up-to-date and effective.

4 How to use them in practice?

In order to effectively use threat intelligence and threat modeling, you need to define your scope and objectives, collect and analyze threat intelligence, perform threat modeling, implement and test security solutions, and review and update your security posture. First, you must determine what you are trying to protect and what your security requirements and constraints are. Next, you must acquire reliable and relevant threat intelligence to filter, validate, and correlate the data. Then, you must identify the assets, components, and data flows of your network as well as any potential threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts. Following this, you must apply the security controls and measures to your network and measure their effectiveness. Lastly, you must monitor new or emerging threats while collecting feedback and lessons learned in order to improve your security posture over time.

5 What are the benefits and challenges?

Using threat intelligence and threat modeling can bring many benefits, such as improving network security awareness and reducing costs. It can also enhance performance and resilience, strengthen culture and governance, and increase value and reputation. However, there can be some challenges as well, such as finding reliable sources of data, balancing the depth and breadth of activities, integrating with other security processes and tools, aligning with business needs, and keeping up with the dynamic threat environment.