How Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Helps Organizations Stay Ahead of Exploits

When developing a vulnerability strategy, it is important to think through the “what if” scenarios that an organization needs to defend against. However, if an organization is only taking into consideration its own knowledge of potential threats, then the plan will likely be incomplete.

In this slideshow, AlienVault, provider of Unified Security Management™ solutions and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, examines how to use crowd-sourced data to strengthen vulnerability management strategies to stay ahead of exploits.

Click through to see how crowd-sourced intelligence can help your organization stay ahead of threats, as identified by AlienVault.

Maximize your limited resources

In today’s dynamic and evolving threat landscape, IT security teams do not have the bandwidth or the resources to do threat analysis on their own. By leveraging crowd-sourced threat intelligence, IT practitioners can achieve preventative response by learning about how others are targeted, and employing the right defenses, to avoid becoming a target themselves.

Minimize attacker’s ability to isolate targets

Isolated victims are the most attractive targets for criminal activity. Participating in the sharing of threat intelligence – whether as a contributor or as a consumer – eliminates this isolation. When intelligence is shared, you gain insight into potential attacks and techniques that could do your business tremendous harm.

Detect attacks before damage is done

Organizations need to make sure that whatever threat sharing system they are participating in can aggregate and disseminate the collective threat data it’s processing in near real-time, so that they benefit quickly from the heterogeneous intelligence it’s collecting. Don’t wait until risks are vetted through a closed system – it’ll be too late.

Know the threat actors

Know the threat actors to check which vectors they use to compromise your systems. If you’re part of a crowd-sourced threat intelligence exchange, you’ll gain better insight into both the threat actors and their methods of attack than you could ever learn on your own or through the threat data you’re collecting through the security point solutions you may have implemented.

Prevent. Detect. Respond.

Crowd-sourced threat intelligence should be part of a comprehensive approach to security that includes products that prevent, detect and then help you respond quickly when a breach occurs. While point products often come with their own intelligence feeds, these feeds are only providing a tiny glimpse of the total threat picture. Imagine the wealth of threat intelligence that can come from a global community of security practitioners representing many different types of organizations and geographies. Using crowd-sourced threat intelligence as part of your security strategy, you’ll be able to pre-emptively respond to threats hurtling your way.