Threat intelligence provides transparency in the threat environments of the third parties the organizations work with by providing them with real-time alerts about the threats timely and accurately.

FREMONT, CA: It is one thing to make sure that the organization’s security infrastructure covers every possible threat entry point, and it’s another to ensure proactive protection.

Amid the ever-increasing volume and sophistication of the online threats, it has become necessary that every organization has to keep up by continuously enhancing its network defense with the help of the accumulation of threat intelligence. But the problem does not end there, and the data has to make sense with respect to whether it has been collected by the organization and connects every dot if they want to maintain a threat-free environment.

The critical ingredient of proactive protection is an effective threat correlation, which means it can defend against not only just known but also the unknown threats. The organizations are typically looking for this type of protection in their IT security solutions and systems. 

Elements of Effective Threat Correlation

The organizations have to guarantee the safety of their client’s network, and it requires the security service providers to reduce any false positives and negatives and also verify the performance of the sensor and its availability. An effective threat correlation can address the challenges.

With the help of proper threat correlation, the responsible team for security can put their focus on the priority issues. The increasing focus will increase their efficiency while reducing the potential risks and along with the corporate legal responsibility brought by the strict privacy protection guidelines and laws. 

If the security providers want to connect the pieces that make up today’s blended threats effectively, they will need high-quality data. The information which is added to the client’s solutions and systems must be both timely and relevant.

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The ultimate correlation process is one that uses near real-time information. The quicker the security providers find about an active attack, the sooner they can deal with it. It will also be more cost-effective to identify and monitor the potential threat sources than addressing an attack’s effects after it has happened. Once a breach is reported, the victim has to compensate in the form of financial remuneration to the ones who own the affected data.

It is also expected from the security team that they use relevant information. The security personnel have to deliver the proper information to the right people at the right time. For example, if a client’s firewall cannot be reached due to failure in the network, the network operations center (NOC) must be alerted. The security providers also need to detect high-risk threats that can get missed by a manual log survey or a tool that interrogates a single device. Every device in the network needs to work with all the others flawlessly.

Security providers have to make sure that their infrastructures can address their clients’ threat intelligence collection, consolidation, and correlation requirements.

What are the 3Cs of an Effective Threat Correlation Architecture

The capable threat correlation architecture involves at least three necessary steps: collection, consolidation, and correlation.

Collection

Some security solutions pull sensor log files from a corporate network, which are then uploaded to a central repository. Compression can be used to reduce the demand for network bandwidth. To reduce bandwidth requirements, others typically perform collection, and initial analysis on the individual devices to distribute the collection process. Regardless of the procedure in which work is distributed and accomplished, the step gathers every available threat intelligence and data feeds that have to be normalized or aggregated.

Consolidation

This step is commonly known as “normalization” or “aggregation.” The phase engages filtering out the irrelevant data so that they can focus on the essential parts defined by security solutions and their users. In this step, most of the false positives also get eliminated.

Consolidation removes the duplicate data and ensures that each is in a standard format. The process helps when it is correlated, as the information can be easily compared with everything else. Even if the data came from other sources that have systems with varying configurations, solutions from different vendors, and many more, still interrelationships can be formed.

Correlation

The ultimate goal is to pull data from various security platforms, correlate it, and provide timely, relevant, and accurate intelligence to the threat response teams so that they can act on it immediately.

Analysts have to run suitable queries to get responses out of it for the solutions that use a centralized database. However, this step can also get hampered by scalability and performance issues. For analyzing such vast amounts of data, the organizations need to get systems that can handle the massive processing requirements, as well as time, and this may also be limited given the fast pace by which threats can penetrate a network.

Every organization must have capable threat correlation architecture if they want to resist the risks that this ever-increasing volume and sophistication of threats pose. It is up to the organizations whether they will rely on in-house or third-party providers for their security requirements, but they have to remember the common. The important thing that they need for their organizations is timely, relevant, and accurate data, and it is something that is not attainable easily.