Organizations must protect themselves against threats relevant to their specific environment. Threat readiness has become an essential component of cybersecurity strategy, enabling businesses to detect and respond to adversaries and methodologies most likely to impact them. This article explores the fundamentals of threat readiness, its importance in modern cybersecurity, and how organizations can build effective threat readiness programs.
Understanding Threat Readiness
Threat readiness, the ability to identify, prepare for, and respond to cybersecurity threats, is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Organizations must understand and focus on the threats most likely to impact their specific context. This understanding empowers them to take a more targeted approach to cybersecurity rather than trying to protect against everything.
The first step in threat readiness is understanding which threat groups target your industry or similar organizations. Geographic location plays a significant role in this assessment—companies in Brazil face very different threat actors than those in Sri Lanka. Similarly, particular groups may target specific industries such as mining infrastructure for trade negotiations or intellectual property theft.
This focused approach creates a Venn diagram of different threat actors, methodologies, and motivations that an organization needs to consider. The goal is to build a security practice to stop these specific threats or detect when these actors target your organization.
From Vulnerabilities to Resilience: The Threat Intelligence Approach
An intelligence-driven approach is crucial for practical threat readiness. This approach involves monitoring cybersecurity through threat feeds, researcher communications, and mailing lists. This creates a deluge of intel that security programs must triage to help detect and protect their environments.
This feed gets narrowed down by tracking specific threat actors, malware families, and what’s “hot” in the news. Building these initial filters ensures that intensive triage processes only happen on threats you care about. Organizations simply don't have the cycles to analyze everything out there—the fidelity isn't there, and false positive rates would be too high.
Understanding what you care about and identifying sources of reliable information is critical. This could be a researcher at a company who has good insight into a threat group, or a specific threat intelligence feed. For example, the government of Ukraine puts out very high-quality threat intel, whereas other government sources might not provide intel that's relevant to your organization.
The Visibility Challenge in Threat Readiness
One of the primary challenges organizations face is determining which threats they should be concerned about. While this might be more straightforward for governments, private-sector companies, SMBs, law firms, and generic businesses often struggle to identify their most relevant threats. However, partnerships with similar companies or governments can provide valuable intelligence, creating a sense of connection and support in the cybersecurity community.
The second major challenge lies in the "plumbing"—taking in that flood of information and applying it meaningfully to your environment. With thousands of threat groups and countless threat articles published daily, it is difficult to extract valuable indicators like IP addresses, hashes, or domains and deploy them effectively.
Implementing this threat intelligence without causing false positives or blocking legitimate services presents a significant hurdle. Companies are generally reluctant to implement automated blocking because everyone has experienced false positive storms in the past. Whether it was an issue with an endpoint protection platform or accidentally blocking legitimate services used by threat actors and legitimate users (like Dropbox), these experiences create technical and political headwinds.
Performance Optimization in Threat Response
Determining what to block automatically versus what to generate alerts for is a nuanced decision that requires careful consideration and planning. This thoughtful and strategic approach is necessary for effective threat detection and response.
Automated threat detection systems are transforming how security operations teams function. One of the most significant capabilities these systems provide is federated search—the ability to access and correlate data from multiple sources in a single search, allowing security teams to gather context from numerous sources when investigating a potential threat like communication with a suspicious domain:
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What was the user browsing when the detection triggered?
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Were they clicking on links in emails?
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Were there unusual processes executing on their endpoint?
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What is the user's role in the organization?
The context matters significantly—a threat researcher triggering an alert for a suspicious domain differs considerably from a salesperson or CEO triggering the same warning. Similarly, understanding the endpoint context (whether it's a malware sandbox, a researcher's machine, or a particular operating system) changes how alerts should be prioritized and handled.
Risk Assessment and Management in Threat Readiness
AI can help with fast federated search to answer all these contextual questions. While some of this capability is generally built into AI systems, your environment is unique, so the AI should also learn from your investigation processes. This allows it to understand that when you see a particular type of malicious activity, it can automate specific investigative steps for you in the future. Data confidentiality is paramount when implementing AI in your threat readiness strategy. Organizations cannot pump alert data into public AI services like OpenAI because that data could be accessible to those companies' employees and potentially others. If your CEO gets compromised and you ask a public AI to help analyze the alert, someone at that company will see your sensitive data.
Therefore, any AI system must keep your data within your tenant and make it inaccessible to outside parties. The system should learn from your actions on alerts and understand how to handle similar incidents in the future. The AI interaction cannot be ephemeral—there must be some concept of longevity or learning based on your security team's activities.
Readiness Through Automation and Integration
Traditional Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) products require organizations to build workflows on a one-off basis, placing the burden on security teams to determine how to conduct investigations and where to look for supporting data. However, security professionals universally prefer access to all available information about an alert, allowing them to determine whether it is good or bad.
The market is shifting toward automated investigation products that understand what security teams need and do it for them, saving valuable time and resources. This approach doesn't just search through logs—it enhances threat detection capabilities by pulling together relevant information from across the organization.
When integrating these systems, organizations must understand what types of searches can be performed without disrupting operations. Some tools allow millions of searches daily without performance impacts, while others might take 30 minutes to return results and block other users. Understanding these limitations helps teams identify efficiency opportunities and justify investments that reduce investigation time from 30 minutes to 10 seconds.
Threat Intelligence Integration and Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory requirements heavily influence how security automation must be implemented. All investigations must be trackable and auditable so organizations can justify their actions later. For example, if a security team suspects a compromise, it might pull all browser traffic from a CEO's computer or all documents from a CFO's computer. In that case, the team must be able to justify its actions.
The same principle applies across country borders. There are various restrictions on accessing data in different regions, such as US-based employees' access to data in the EU. While security investigations often have exemptions to these restrictions, organizations must document why they accessed the data to protect themselves during regulatory audits.
The Future of Threat Readiness
The evolution of threat readiness and security automation will free investigators to do more interesting work by eliminating the grunt work of copying/pasta-ing between screens. This automation will also reduce burnout by eliminating repetitive tasks that often don't result in significant findings.
Nothing is worse for security operations center (SOC) analysts than doing substantial work with nothing to show for it. Advanced threat readiness systems will handle the initial investigation steps that might lead nowhere, allowing security professionals to focus on novel investigations and more interesting threads to pull on.
By implementing comprehensive threat readiness programs that combine intelligence, automation, and human expertise, organizations can build more resilient security postures that protect against the threats most likely to impact them. This focused approach allows for more efficient resource use while providing better protection against the most relevant cybersecurity risks.