The role of threat intelligence monitoring

What is threat monitoring?

Threat monitoring is a proactive security measure that enables organizations to detect, identify, and respond to potential security incidents in an increasingly sophisticated and pervasive era. By continuously analyzing network behavior and communications, threat monitoring allows security teams to gain visibility into suspicious activities and anomalies, helping protect sensitive data and maintain the integrity of information systems. Digital threat monitoring actions and technologies are crucial to improving an organization’s cyber resilience and ransomware readiness.

By identifying anomalous behaviors and patterns (i.e., indicators of compromise, or IoCs), threat monitoring—or detection—practices and solutions set the stage for mitigating the effects of bad actors before they negatively impact the business. For example, creating a security breach or extracting data through a double extortion ransomware scheme for financial gain. Tools used for vulnerability scanning, behavioral analytics, data security and management, security information and event management (SIEM), and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) are typically part of threat monitoring practices because they alert teams to threats and often can kick off the response process. A security team often takes the lead in handling threat response, performing steps to assess, contain, and eliminate the threat.

Why is threat monitoring important as a proactive security measure?

As cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, cyber threat monitoring is essential in today’s digital business—world where collaboration, purchases, and engagement happen online. Implementing a proactive security measure allows organizations to respond to potential security breaches or attacks more effectively.

Sensitive data traversing and stored in organizations’ networks is a prime target for those with malicious intent. Cybercriminals can wreak havoc by demanding ransom, stealing credentials and customer data, or exposing secrets. Identifying and responding to detected threats is essential for maintaining a proactive approach to cybersecurity. Threat monitoring is important to ensure an organization effectively:

• Safeguards sensitive business data from potential security threats, particularly personal identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and intellectual property (IP).
• Prevents business disruption, such as productivity loss from downtime caused by successful cyber intrusions and data breaches.
• Maintains customer loyalty and brand trust by finding threats before a breach.
• Avoids regulatory fines, which can be substantial monetary damages.

Traditional business continuity and disaster recovery planning approaches are designed to address straightforward operational challenges— like a natural disaster or a ransomware attack in progress. Threat monitoring solutions and techniques can be used to discover root causes (i.e., cyber adversaries) and drive remediation actions that prevent their success and recurrence.

In the era where cyber threats are growing in sophistication, frequency, and severity—including automated attacks using AI, advanced persistent threats (APTs), zero-day threats, and ransomware—threat monitoring is an essential component of cyber resilience.

Regarding ransomware attacks alone, 80% of organizations fear their cyber resilience strategies aren’t enough. Should an attack occur, organizations must respond quickly and effectively. That agility starts with centralized visibility across infrastructure and data, complemented by automated detection of anomalies and cyber threats. In other words, it starts with threat monitoring.

What are the benefits of threat monitoring

Today, threats are increasingly sophisticated, and attack methods are constantly evolving. Threat monitoring is essential for maintaining security across network environments and endpoints. Tools such as intrusion detection systems, network security monitoring, and behavioral analytics are employed to analyze network traffic and detect threats early, reducing the risk of data breaches and unauthorized data access. By integrating threat intelligence with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, threat monitoring provides the information needed to detect and respond rapidly to emerging threats.

There are several benefits of threat monitoring, including the following:

• Efficient operations and high customer satisfaction – Threat monitoring helps organizations maintain highly available and resilient customer and employee services while continuing to protect sensitive business data – PII, PHI, IP, etc.
• Fast recovery – With savvy cybercriminals targeting known and new vulnerabilities, threat monitoring is vital to reducing the mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), helping minimize the damage associated with cyberattacks. By identifying even advanced threats that can elude traditional security technologies, cyber threat monitoring empowers organizations to act quickly to reduce risk and avoid costly network downtime.
• Improved data security posture management (DSPM) – Ongoing threat monitoring elevates knowledge and awareness of the cyber threat landscape and the newest attack techniques. It also helps cybersecurity teams understand threats in context so they can boost their DSPM. In turn, they can focus on threats posing the most risk to the organization and invest in the processes, threat monitoring tools, and policies that will best improve its security posture.
• Regulatory compliance – For organizations required to adhere to industry and government regulations, threat monitoring can help demonstrate compliance with mandated security approaches.

This continuous observation allows organizations to anticipate and counter potential threats before they impact critical systems. Threat monitoring is an indispensable approach that equips organizations with the insights and capabilities required to navigate the increasingly complex cyber threat landscape, ensuring both the security and resilience of their information systems.

What are the methods of threat detection?

Organizations rely on multiple monitoring techniques and tools, particularly ones designed to identify previously known attack patterns and user behaviors. No matter what tool a security team uses, the focus is usually on identifying network-based, behavior-based, or file-based IoCs.

In an increasingly complex era of cyber threats, endpoint threat monitoring has become a cornerstone for effective security strategy. This approach allows organizations to detect and address threats across systems, utilizing threat intelligence and advanced monitoring techniques to maintain the security and integrity of critical data. Endpoint threat monitoring helps with its ability to provide rapid response strategies and empower security teams with valuable insights.

Other commonly used threat monitoring tools include antivirus software that uses malware signatures and heuristics to discover threats. Teams also count on intrusion detection systems that scan networks to uncover traffic and attacks deviating from known patterns and network traffic analysis that detects malicious or unauthorized activities via aberrant behavior. With threat intelligence, teams can identify desirable targets, recognize cyberattack patterns, detect threats early to gain insights into attacker motivations, and uncover infrastructure weaknesses. User behavior analytics inspect logs for abnormal traffic patterns.

Through tactics, techniques, and procedures tailored to identify evolving attack methods, threat monitoring enables organizations to analyze network behavior and communications proactively. Tools such as intrusion detection systems, malware analysis, and analytics are essential in detecting suspicious activities, helping to prevent breaches before they impact operations. By integrating various security tools, organizations can monitor endpoints more effectively, utilizing a combination of detection systems and analytics to understand the landscape and identify the types of threats they face.

Top threat monitoring tools incorporate intelligence that helps security teams not only define emerging threats but also maintain a proactive stance against potential threats. As new threats emerge, effective threat monitoring ensures that organizations are equipped to understand and navigate these challenges. Monitoring provides valuable insights, enabling organizations to maintain the security of their information systems and ensure they are resilient against known and emerging cyber risks.

While these methods can help monitor threats, some are more effective than others. Namely, AI-based monitoring is proving powerful in monitoring and analyzing behavior patterns and identifying anomalies and threat variants across large data volumes. It can even predict the likely outcomes of unusual behavior by comparing anomalies to accumulated knowledge bases. With worldwide data volumes projected to reach 200 zettabytes by 2025, automated cyber threat monitoring via AI is likely to become the default.

How to monitor security threats and detect them early?

Monitoring for and detecting security threats early requires an approach focused on cyber resilience and ransomware readiness. Begin by investing in modern backup and recovery to understand risk exposure and minimize the impact of attacks. From there, employ the following steps:

1. Discover and classify the organization’s most sensitive data to streamline risk management and threat response.
2. Automatically monitor backup data—adding AI-powered capabilities—to detect anomalies that might indicate attacks launched from inside or outside the network.
3. Use a YARA tool to create rules based on IoCs so teams can detect malicious activity early in an attack sequence and new threat variants.
4. Use information associated with IoCs to understand how a threat infiltrated the environment and fine-tune security policies and YARA rules accordingly. Integrating threat intelligence in monitoring can further enhance this process by providing real-time intelligence feeds that automate the identification and response to threats.
5. Complement monitoring with threat hunting that locates and roots out cyberattacks that have successfully penetrated the infrastructure undetected.
6. Gain global visibility into the organization’s data and security posture with a single data security and management platform to holistically detect and recover from threats and attacks.

Cohesity and threat monitoring

Organizations must adopt advanced threat monitoring techniques to maintain the security and integrity of their systems. Effective threat monitoring provides rapid response strategies, enabling organizations to detect and address incidents swiftly. By analyzing network behavior and communications, threat monitoring helps identify suspicious activities and spot potential breaches before they escalate.

Cybercriminals continuously seeking to attack organizations’ systems prioritize ransomware and data theft for lucrative payoffs. With so much at stake in safeguarding data stores, organizations need a data security and management platform designed to resist and defend against data-centric threats. Ideally, the platform makes it possible to detect ransomware attacks and other threats, while preventing data from being corrupted, deleted, or stolen.

Cohesity Data Cloud—complemented by Cohesity DataProtect and Cohesity DataHawk—empowers teams to strengthen threat monitoring approaches.

Cohesity uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to identify the latest variants of ransomware and other cyberattacks, vulnerabilities, and data exfiltration techniques to assess attack impact. With a single click, security teams and analysts can search for IoCs and rank threats in the environment without writing rules or programming. The platform also makes it possible to identify threats in backup snapshots that could thwart attack recovery.

Cohesity solutions also support unlimited, immutable snapshots, enabling organizations to gain insights into risk exposure via backup data. With Cohesity, teams can tag sensitive data using AI-driven data classification. This helps determine the exposure of sensitive information in the event of an attack.

Leadership in the Data Security Alliance and integrations with leading security vendors and applications—such as Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Okta, and Cisco Secure X—make Cohesity an ideal platform for organizations to automate incident response and harness existing enterprise security services such as identity and access management as well as threat and vulnerability scanning. By working in unison, these capabilities and integrations provide a hardened data protection platform that helps organizations better detect and respond to attacks in progress and prevent attacks from tampering with or destroying data.

The importance of threat monitoring can not be overstated. To learn more about how DataProtect and DataHawk extend the security and threat detection capabilities of Cohesity Data Cloud.