Cyber Threat Analysis

Cyber threat analysis in cybersecurity is the process of matching information about vulnerabilities in an organization’s network against real-world cyber threats. It’s a practice that mixes vulnerability testing with risk assessment to better understand the potential risks a network may face.

Cybersecurity threat analysis is based on the theory that if you know more about your system’s weak spots, you can better defend it. By reverse engineering cybersecurity practices, cyber threat analysis seeks to capture information about potential threats and security risks to your organization to help turn reactive cybersecurity methods into proactive practices.

Cyber threat analysis involves defining what you want to include in your analysis. Thus, teams must look critically at what network entities and data they want to protect and define sensitivity levels for those items to utilize resources appropriately.

Teams must implement policies that require collecting data for monitoring and recording when a cyberattack or data breach occurs. To gather data for threat analysis, teams must collect and aggregate log data about past incidents, such as phishing attacks, malware infections, port scan attacks, and other security events. Good information typically comes from logs for network firewalls, intrusion attempts, detection system incidents, and similar devices.

Teams need to look at event logs from across the IT infrastructure for log data patterns, comparing against an updated database of known worldwide threats. This strategy can include examining failed SQL injections, which might indicate an attacker targeting your databases, improper user activity, unauthorized USB usage, intrusion attempts, and bad IP addresses.

Organizations rely more on data than ever before, which may be spread across an organization’s network infrastructure, from on-premises servers to the cloud. At the same time, admins must be concerned about insider threats, as user activity can pose a risk to sensitive business data. Additionally, cyber threats are becoming increasingly persistent and sophisticated.

Cyber threat analysis is vital because it:

• Greatly improves an organization’s overall security posture
• Helps prevent the loss of sensitive company data
• Allows teams to assess threats more easily
• Lets admins compare potential issues with known threats using threat intelligence feeds
• Enables you to consider past data and real-time logs while forming more efficient security strategies for the future
• Helps you minimize damages and recover faster when attacks occur

Cyber threat analysis tools use automation and monitoring to quickly detect threats and help with compliance management.

Cyber threat analysis tools are built to transform security log data from different parts of a network into useful information to provide users with real-time monitoring. Cyber threat analyzers can gather log data from multiple sources, including firewalls, routers, workstations, and servers.

Additionally, you can customize these network threat analysis solutions to the unique needs of your IT environment, such as the ability to send immediate alerts on potential threats or run automatic reports that highlight key vulnerabilities and risks. Unlike human analysts, a tool is built to do this across more data and with more accuracy to help save your organization resources and costs.

SEM is an on-premises, full-featured, and comprehensive cyber threat analysis SIEM tool. SEM can enable teams to define custom or out-of-the-box log event rules for network threat analysis practices so they can identify cyber threats and investigate security breaches.

Additionally, this cybersecurity threat analysis tool allows teams to set automatic alarms and alerts when suspicious events occur. Admins can define alert thresholds to avoid false positives and ensure relevant notifications are sent to the right team members. Users can set the system to run automatic reports based on custom threat filters. These features can allow teams to respond to immediate issues and collect valuable data to help improve their cyber threat intelligence framework.

To get the most out of SEM, you will want to follow cyber security threat analysis best practices. You should:

• Prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk: Not all vulnerabilities pose the same threat level, so focus on those with the highest potential impact.
• Train employees: It’s important to conduct security awareness training to ensure all employees can recognize and appropriately respond to potential threats.
• Create an incident response plan: Develop a comprehensive incident response plan to guide your team through containment, mitigation, and recovery steps.
• Set custom alerts: You should configure SEM to detect and alert you of critical threats without overwhelming your team with unnecessary notifications.
• Correlate network events: Leverage SEM to find patterns across various events and identify cyber threats.
• Analyze historical and real-time data: Look closely at past incident data and real-time insights to gain a better understanding of your network and the threats it faces and improve threat prediction and response strategies.

Related features:

• Cyber Threat Intelligence Feeds
• Security Risk Management Capabilities
• Threat Prevention
• Threat Detection
• Threat Management
• Network Security Tool
• Healthcare Security Solution
• Network Security Monitoring

Related tools:

• SolarWinds Access Rights Manager
• SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted and Security Observability