How to Employ the Threat Intelligence Lifecycle in Your SOC: Scaling Your TI Program and Measuring its Effectiveness

In parts one and two of this series, we provided the first steps of how to build a proactive, adaptable threat intelligence program. First, we outlined how to define your organization’s priority intelligence requirements (PIRs), then we provided recommendations on how to scale them across your organization based on key lessons learned from our own threat intelligence team here at ZeroFox.

Because our goal was to build an internal threat intelligence (TI) program that is truly intelligence requirements-driven to protect against advanced threats that can compromise our customers, we mirrored our process with each of the steps of the threat intelligence lifecycle. By applying the threat intelligence cycle steps to our process, our team was able to move beyond reactive measures to develop a reinforced, proactive threat intelligence program that is better equipped to anticipate, identify, and mitigate threats before they can impact our organization, our customers’ organizations, and their customers’ organizations. 

In the third and final part of this series, we’ll provide guided steps on how to scale your team of intelligence analysts, integrate daily TI operations in your security operations center (SOC), and how to build metrics to measure the effectiveness of your TI program.

5 Steps to Scale Your Threat Intelligence Team 

Scaling your threat intelligence team ensures your organization can effectively manage current and future threats, maintain compliance, and support broader security and business objectives. Steps to implement this can include:

1. Assess Current Workload and Skill Sets

• Evaluate the current workload and responsibilities of your existing team.
• Identify specific skills and expertise required to address current and emerging threats.

2. Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities

• Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member (both current and any gaps) based on their skills and expertise.
• Ensure there is a well-defined structure for threat detection, incident response, and other functions.

3. Invest in Training and Development

• Provide ongoing training and professional development opportunities to enhance the skills of your team.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning to keep your team updated on the latest intelligence trends and technologies.

4. Leverage Automation

• Implement automated tools to streamline routine and repetitive tasks, so your team can focus on more complex and strategic activities.
• Invest in advanced security technologies that can enhance your team's capabilities.

5. Collaborate and Communicate Effectively

• Foster strong communication and collaboration within your team and with other departments.
• Establish clear communication channels for sharing threat intelligence and information about security incidents.

How to Integrate TI Operations in Your SOC

Integrating threat intelligence, such as real-time feeds, into your SOC is essential to enhance your team’s ability to detect, analyze, and respond to threats effectively. Threat intelligence provides your SOC with up-to-date information on the latest threats, vulnerabilities, and attack vectors. This helps your team identify Indicators of Compromise (IoC) or Indicators of Attack (IoA) and perform more effective predictive analyses to anticipate and mitigate threats before they can impact your organization– overall, improving your team’s threat detection capabilities.

Integrating threat intelligence also helps improve incident response, threat hunting, strategic decision-making, and operational efficiency.

Incident Response

• Alert Contextualization: Threat intelligence adds analyst context to alerts, helping your team prioritize and respond appropriately based on the specific threat’s relevance and severity.
• Root Cause Analysis: Threat Intelligence helps your team understand the threat landscape and perform thorough root cause analyses.

Threat Hunting

Threat intelligence supports proactive threat hunting by providing hunting hypotheses and attacker TTPS (tactics, techniques, and procedures). This helps analysts understand attacker patterns and leverage them for guided, proactive threat hunts to investigate for signs of compromise.

Strategic Decision Making

Threat intelligence provides insights into risk assessments and resource allocation by helping your team evaluate risks posed by different threats, determine the most critical vulnerabilities to address, and allocate the appropriate SOC resources to focus on the most significant or urgent threats.

Automation and Efficiency

• Automated Enrichment: Automating the enrichment of alerts with threat intelligence reduces manual work and speeds up analysis.
• Playbooks and Workflows: Automating response actions based on threat intelligence  helps streamline incident response processes.

How to Design Metrics to Benchmark Your TI Program

Metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) are essential to measure the effectiveness of a threat intelligence program. These metrics help:

• Assess overall effectiveness
• Allocate resources appropriately
• Benchmark improvements
• Prioritize threats
• Facilitate stakeholder communication
• Enhance adaptability
• Manage threats effectively

ZeroFox SOC Tip: Though these metrics will vary depending on your organization and business goals, examples of metrics and KPIs our team tracks include:

• Feeds Received: The total amount of unfiltered feeds received from all TI sources.
• Feeds Alerted: The total amount of filtered feeds that triggered a TI alert.
• Actionable vs. Non-Actionable Alerts: Alerts that triggered an actionable item vs. alerts classified as informative or non-actionable. This metric aids in the identification of how effective our TI program is in generating actionable threat intel products.
• Actions Triggered: The amount of different actions triggered by each actionable TI alert generated. This can vary depending on your business, but some essentials are: vulnerability patched, configuration check, indicator check, and security control verification.
• TTA (Time To Alert): The time between when a feed is received and the generation of a TI alert.
• TTR (Time To Resolution): The time between the generation of a TI alert and the case resolution. This metric doesn’t necessarily measure the performance of a threat intel program, but it’s a good indicator of how TI alerts are perceived by the consumers.

We recommend managing these metrics in an automated dashboard, for easily-accessible reporting and discussion. This approach is useful not only to show the results of the program, but to also maintain awareness of how the threat landscape is evolving. Additional metrics might vary, depending on the characteristics of your organization, such as: TI source reliability, alert quality, false positives, and false negative rate.

How to Ensure Continuous Improvement of Your TI Program

Once you have defined your TI program’s metrics and KPIs, leverage them to ensure your team evolves in tandem with the threat landscape. This should include identifying gaps or areas of weakness and adjusting your internal processes to improve them. Include an approach to measure the maturity level of your TI program using known frameworks, such as TICMM (Threat Intelligence Capability Maturity Level) by CREST (Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers) and CTIM (Cyber Threat Intelligence Maturity framework) by the SANS Institute. The maturity level measurement will aid in the identification of the current status of your TI program and also in determining future goals to achieve.

Wrapping It All Up

Building a proactive, intelligence requirements-driven approach to your internal threat intelligence program is essential for modern organizations to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats. This approach helps your security team anticipate and mitigate potential attacks before they occur, enhancing your organization's overall security posture. By mirroring each step of the threat intelligence lifecycle while building your TI program, your organization can effectively identify its key stakeholders, define intelligence requirements, leverage multiple intelligence sources, create actionable playbooks, and design metrics to measure its effectiveness, growth, and areas for continuous improvement. This proactive strategy ensures timely, relevant threat intelligence is available to inform decision-making, protect internal and external assets, and ultimately, safeguard your organization's reputation and customer trust.

Tags: Cybersecurity, Threat Intelligence