Enhancing Vulnerability Management with Threat Intelligence

The shift towards a proactive cybersecurity mindset has been steadily gaining momentum. Industry experts have emphasized the importance of best practices for implementation and the role of security orchestration. By integrating modern threat intelligence solutions into vulnerability management platforms, forward-thinking enterprises can become more proactive in their fight against cyber threats.

Integrating Threat Intelligence with Vulnerability Management

Integrating a threat intelligence solution like Mandiant adds a new dimension to your unified vulnerability management.

The leading threat intelligence vendors are all continuously monitoring the global threat landscape and are collecting data to develop predictive analytics and forecasting models. Mapping this global threat landscape against your organization's vulnerabilities enables you to develop a more strategic approach to managing vulnerabilities. It will allow you to conduct better risk scoring and to better prioritize vulnerabilities, focusing on the most pertinent risks to your unique security environment.

Best Practices for Integrating Threat Intelligence

There are best practices to look into beyond the technical integration with your vulnerability management platform:

1. Adding Organizational Context: Your threat intelligence signals and insights need to be put into the specific context of your organization’s infrastructure and applications. Use the various reports and dashboards from your security tools to augment threat intelligence data.
2. Ensuring Timeliness of Data: To make the most of up-to-date threat intelligence data, it is critical that your processes and teams can act on it in a timely manner. Avoid introducing additional delays and use automation wherever feasible.
3. Fostering Interdepartmental Collaboration: Build reports and set up appropriate alerts that keep your security teams, devops teams and stakeholders informed and on the same page.
4. Keeping Teams up to date: Most modern threat intelligence vendors are offering in-depth analysis on adversaries, executive briefings and breach analysis case-studies. Take advantage of these reports in your recurring security stand-ups and team off-sites. 

Benefits of integrating Threat Intelligence

Improved Risk Assessment and Prioritization

Your unified vulnerability management platform should have the ability to map threat intelligence signals to risk scores. Adding those to your vulnerability risk scoring calculations will improve your overall assessment of the respective risks and allows you to better prioritize. 

Proactive Defense

Modern threat intelligence vendors do provide insightful and regularly updated research “from the frontlines”. You can use those insights to inform your developer learning programs (e.g. Secure Code Warrior, Secure Flag, codebashing) on your unified vulnerability management platform. Use the platform to surface those learning modules to developers who will benefit the most from it. This allows you to become more proactive and targeted in your secure coding and deployment practices.

Threat Forecasting

Predictive analytics and proactive exposure management can give you an opportunity to take pre-emptive measures to mitigate potential risks. Orchestrate your security scans where you assume that adversaries are trying to most likely breach your applications and infrastructure. Some vulnerability management platforms let you fine-tune risk scores on a per-application basis. In such cases, you can adjust the risk scoring to the specific insights from the threat intelligence solution using your unified vulnerability management platform.

Empowering AppSec with Security Orchestration

Security orchestration is crucial for timely decision-making, enabling security teams to react quickly and effectively in real-time to emerging threats. In vulnerability management, security orchestration streamlines the detection and response processes, reducing the time between identifying and mitigating a vulnerability. This streamlined approach is vital in today's fast-paced cyber landscape, where delays can lead to significant breaches.

In essence, security orchestration acts as the glue that binds together all aspects of threat intelligence and vulnerability management. It amplifies the effectiveness of each component, leading to a more resilient and responsive cybersecurity framework.