Understanding Your Threat Landscape: A Crucial Step for Security Professionals

Understanding and Addressing Your Threat Landscape: A Critical Priority for Security Professionals

The Importance of Starting with Your Threat Landscape

In today’s ever-changing world of cybersecurity, understanding your organization’s threat landscape is the key to making informed decisions and protecting your infrastructure. Regardless of the use case, your security organization is focused on; you are likely to waste valuable time and resources making poor decisions if you don’t start by mapping out your threat landscape.

The Problem with Starting with the Great Unknown

As security professionals, our natural inclination is to start with the great unknown – scouring all the threat feeds and sources of external threat data available that combine to form the threat universe. However, starting there results in a big data problem – an overwhelming amount of data from commercial, open-source, government, industry, and existing security vendors, to name a few.

Focusing on Your Infrastructure Intersection

Instead, it would be best to focus on the intersection of the threat universe and your infrastructure to arrive at your threat landscape. Your threat landscape narrows down the pool of threats originating from the great unknown to those relevant to your infrastructure. This intersection provides a detailed and focused analysis of the threats that matter to your organization.

Narrowing Down the Threat Landscape

By narrowing down your threat landscape, you can focus on the top three to five adversaries that pose the most significant threat to your organization. Understanding these adversaries’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) helps you identify the vulnerabilities they often target and develop proactive measures to address them.

Addressing Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is a use case where organizations of all sizes and industries grapple with a constant stream of new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) reported each year. These vulnerabilities often pose significant risks to organizations, and determining which ones to focus on can be a daunting task. However, by applying context from internal data about your infrastructure and assets and segmenting and filtering threat intelligence, you can identify vulnerabilities relevant to your environment and prioritize patching and remediation efforts.

Catching Compromises Earlier

By focusing on the most critical vulnerabilities in your threat landscape, you can proactively patch and remediate issues that pose the greatest risks to your infrastructure. If evidence of compromise exists, you can map it to the MITRE ATT&CK framework to determine the courses of action you can take and catch compromises earlier than you would have otherwise.

Advice for Security Professionals

As a security professional, it’s essential to stay focused on your threat landscape and the handful of adversaries you are up against. Simply automating processes or deploying security tools may not be enough to safeguard your infrastructure. Instead, start by understanding your specific threat landscape, including the top threats facing your organization and your infrastructure’s most critical security vulnerabilities. This information can help you prioritize your security efforts and develop a robust and effective security plan. In conclusion, starting with your organization’s threat landscape and overlaying context about your infrastructure helps you make better-informed decisions that proactively address vulnerabilities and protect your organization from potential threats.