How well do you know the enemy? The better you understand your cyber threats, the better you can defend against them. And that’s precisely what threat profiling offers: Insights on adversaries targeting your business to predict and prevent cyber attacks.
Understanding Threat Profiling
Proactive cybersecurity requires you to understand the threats you face as an organization. And identifying where a potential threat could come from is key to preparing a mitigation and response strategy. This could be internal or external threats, threat actors who have recently exploited similar orgs in the same industry vertical you operate in, or an emerging threat in software that you have resident in your network. Identifying a threat and its potential impact beforehand is key to the response.
What is Threat Profiling?
Threat profiling is a way to identify and understand potential cyber threats. And just like you’d create a profile for other things, such as a social media account or employee records, it provides a snapshot for your organization. In this case, however, these are insights on your vulnerabilities, known criminals or hacking groups, and/or trends you’d use to prepare for an attack, including:
- Identifiable info like name, group (or country) affiliations, and location
- Common systems target critical infrastructure, personal data, or proprietary information.
- Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs)
- Motives
- Typical attack vectors
- Indicators of compromise (IoC)
- Vulnerabilities they tend to exploit
The Importance of Threat Profiling
Imagine the value of knowing the likelihood, the how, and where the next cyber attack will come from. You could add new controls, reallocate resources (personnel, tools, etc) to different data systems, and tailor your overall strategy where you see fit. Well, that’s exactly what makes threat profiling so important.
By understanding your threats from the top down and having robust intelligence capabilities, you can anticipate attacks and strengthen cybersecurity defenses accordingly.
How Threat Profiling Enhances a Proactive Cybersecurity Strategy
Proactive cybersecurity is foundational to developing a modern strategy. And threat profiling offers a reliable way to anticipate cyber attacks in advance and customize security measures accordingly.
Anticipating Cyber Threats Before They Happen
Foresight is a powerful tool in cybersecurity. Knowing where, when, and how a malicious actor will deliver an attack can reduce the impact of a cyber incident or avert a crisis altogether. And by creating detailed threat profiles, you can anticipate threats and take preventive measures rather than reacting after the fact.
For example, let’s say you’re a healthcare company navigating the threat landscape. After gaining intel into attack groups, you learn that the most common method against hospitals is deploying ransomware on EHR systems. It locks clinical data and disrupts patient care until payment delivery.
Based on these insights, you elect to add stricter clinician access controls and MFA, plus advanced malware detection tools specifically tuned to catch tactics identified in the threat profiles.
Customizing Security Measures Based on Threat Profiles
Threat profiling maximizes security efficiency since you don’t waste time or resources preparing for things that are unlikely to happen. It supports a tailored cybersecurity strategy geared to your business. Cyber defenses aren’t broad but specifically focused on the most likely attack scenarios.
For instance, let’s say you’re a bank. And after undergoing threat profiling, you uncover that the most likely attack and target by a hacker is SQL injections against the system storing customer credit card data. With this info, you can now customize your vulnerability scanning to specifically concentrate on spotting code or user access misconfigurations on that database.
Steps to Develop an Effective Threat Profile
To maximize threat profiling impact, you need it tailored to your business. Here’s how to develop a solid threat profile to boost cyber defenses:
Identify Critical Assets
First and foremost, pinpoint your most important assets. If compromised, which parts of your network could shut down the operation, diminish your brand reputation, ruin your competitive advantage, or get you hit with legal and non-compliance fees? Here are a few:
- Proprietary information
- Software and systems critical to the operation
- Customer and employee personally identifiable information (PII)
- Company bank account and finance records
- Data falling under a compliance umbrella (health, financial, etc.)
- Network segments with classified or highly sensitive data
This is crucial to crafting your cybersecurity strategy. It lets you prioritize by highlighting which systems need the highest level of care and attention. And if these assets are so vital to your business, they’re likely appealing targets to a cyber attacker.
Analyze Past Cyber Incidents
Detectives look at criminal activity history to create case profiles, and this is very similar to cyber threat profiling. The next step requires you to analyze past cyber incidents to detect patterns and exploited vulnerabilities. When did it happen? What was the target? What tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) were used?
Anything that gives you a grasp of past incidents is useful information.
Details from incident reports, case studies, malware samples, ransomware research reports, and IoC datasheets can help you in this step. This ultimately gives you insight into potential threats and enables you to refine threat profiles with more information.
Leverage Threat Intelligence
While step two looks at general past trends, step three has you identify emerging threats relevant to your industry. You get predictive analysis on what’s to come by tracking evolving phishing campaigns, ransomware variants, and other changing threat trends targeting specific industries. This helps craft threat profiles that stay ahead of the curve.
You can get these insights from external sources like:
- General or industry-specific intelligence-sharing platforms
- Government agencies (like CISA) and law enforcement
- Cybersecurity companies specializing in threat intelligence
- Threat intelligence platforms
- Threat research groups
Leveraging Threat Profiling Tools and Techniques
Threat profiling is tedious if done manually. The good news is that plenty of tools are available to build profiles faster and maintain accurate intel.
Automated Threat Profiling Tools
Much of threat profiling is collecting and analyzing data — something automation can take off your plate. Some common tools you can use include:
- Threat intelligence platforms (TIPs): Auto collects, aggregates, and enriches data on threat actors and their TTPs.
- Threat hunting systems: Integrate with your managed detection and response (MDR) solution to actively discover adversary activity that evaded existing controls.
Automation streamlines the profiling process. It also ensures more accurate intelligence. Humans are prone to mistakes like incorrectly inputting threat data, making errors when running algorithms, and misinterpreting threat analysis. But automation uses advanced tools to do the heavy lifting.
Continuous Monitoring and Updating
When you constantly have eyes on events in your IT infrastructure and externally, you can adjust threat profiles accordingly. MDR solutions offer continuous monitoring capabilities for all activities in your network. They can also provide expertise on emerging and evolving threats they’ve encountered on the outside.
Other systems that can help you monitor and update cyber threat profiles include:
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems
- Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) services
- Vulnerability management tools
Integrating Threat Profiling Into Your Cybersecurity Strategy
Threat profiling puts you on a fast track to proactive cybersecurity. And integrating it into your strategy is a great way to meet business and security objectives.
Aligning Threat Profiles with Business Objectives
Resources are limited. You only have so much of a budget, so many personnel, and so much time you can allocate toward beefing up defenses. Therefore, threat profiles should align with your objectives and risk tolerance. There’s no sense in spending a lot to enhance security for a system a threat actor doesn’t care about.
Threat profiling lets you prioritize and focus on your high-risk areas — ensuring critical assets are secure without breaking the bank or impacting operational uptime.
Building a Holistic Security Framework
A modern cybersecurity strategy is layered and comprehensive. Here’s how you can incorporate threat profiles that address all aspects of security:
- Identify and prioritize critical assets to pinpoint which are most susceptible and need added protection
- Add defensive security controls that directly address risks indicated by your threat profiles
- Continuously monitor network and user activity and use intel from threat profiles to fine-tune detection rules
- Use threat profiles to develop incident response plans based on the most likely attack scenarios
- Train staff to provide awareness of common tactics and vectors indicated by your threat profiles
Threat Profiling Lets You Achieve Cyber Resilience
A modern security strategy demands proactive cybersecurity practices. Only through threat profiling can you anticipate attacks before they develop and update defenses accordingly.
Contact the CyberMaxx experts today to start building or refining your threat profiles.
