Proactive, predictive and preventive are the three Ps of threat intelligence. If you’re waiting until a cyber attacker is in your network before you attempt to neutralize them, it’s too late. In today’s world of sophisticated cyber attacks, often sponsored by nation states, you cannot be reactive. Instead, you have to take the fight to the attackers, finding out who they are and what they’re going to do before they have the opportunity to do it.
Threat intelligence powered by deception is the most effective way to meet cyber attackers where they are, and gather the data you need for successful incident response. If you’re not already using deception technology, it’s something you should consider implementing as soon as possible.
In this article, we’ll explain how deception-powered threat intelligence works, including how it fits in with your current cybersecurity setup. We’ll also examine how CounterCraft’s threat intelligence powered by deception should be your first choice to protect your organization’s critical IT infrastructure. Let’s get started.
Understanding Deception-Powered Threat Intelligence
There are three common types of threat intelligence organizations use to build up a picture of the cyber threats they face:
- Strategic – Analyzing patterns and identifying trends in the cyber risk landscape, allowing leaders to plan for a proactive approach to cybersecurity.
- Tactical – Actionable intelligence that cybersecurity teams need to focus on immediately in order to safeguard their essential services.
- Operational – Data on how cyber attackers operate, including tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that allow organizations to anticipate potential attacks that may arise in the future.
You may be utilizing three different threat intelligence sources in your organization to cover all these bases. Threat intelligence powered by deception is different because it combines all three types, delivering strategic, actionable threat intelligence that network security teams can rely on.
Briefly, here’s how it works. Deception technology creates a ‘digital twin’ of your network, running parallel to your actual network. It then drops a trail of breadcrumbs to lure potential cyber-attackers in. Cyber attackers enter the replica network and go about their malicious business (e.g. dropping malware, stealing data, instigating a DDoS attack) thinking they’re in your real network. But of course, they’re not. While the attackers are in the digital twin, the deception technology monitors their activity, so you can predict their next moves.
The second an attacker interacts with the decoy, the technology generates an alert. For network security teams that often find themselves wasting time chasing false positives, an alert generated by deception-powered threat intelligence is immediate, relevant and evidence of genuine malicious activity. If you act on only one alert, it should be one like this.
When you use deception to generate threat intelligence (alongside conventional methods like surveying the threat landscape and spotting indicators of compromise), you gain several benefits:
- Early threat detection – You know who the attackers are and what they’re doing before they can infiltrate your network.
- No false positives – An alert generated by deception technology is clear evidence of a cyber-attack.
- Threat analysis – By analyzing the actions of real cyber attackers in the digital twin, you can spot vulnerabilities you may have missed, which you can fix for the future.
- Faster incident response – By detecting threats early, with information on techniques and tactics, you can neutralise an attack before it severely damages your IT environment.
Challenges in Integrating Deception-Powered Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence powered by deception is the latest weapon in the arsenal for organizations wanting to take a proactive, predictive and preventive approach to cybersecurity. As a result, there can be challenges when you first implement it, including getting it to integrate with your existing security controls. However, you can overcome these obstacles with thorough planning – and the best deception technology.
“Threat intelligence powered by deception is the latest weapon in the arsenal for organizations wanting to take a proactive, predictive and preventive approach to cybersecurity.”
The first challenge is getting your new threat intelligence powered by deception technology to play nicely with the rest of your cybersecurity tech stack. Will your deception tool be compatible with your existing tools like your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system? Will they communicate with each other? Will the integration be easy to set up and maintain? What’s the risk if they can’t work well together from the start?
At CounterCraft, we designed The Platform to integrate seamlessly with your existing tech stack, whether it’s network security, cloud security or anything else. The Platform supports all popular SIEMs and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response systems (SOARs), so you can be up and running in minutes rather than weeks.
The next challenge is complexity. Will you be able to set up and run deception-based environments and gain all the benefits outlined in the previous section?
CounterCraft’s platform is designed to be straightforward to set up and use. Its built-in automation and handy templates make designing and building deception campaigns quick and simple (95% faster than similar technologies). At the same time, its intuitive UI allows you to access, manage and deliver threat intelligence from one clear dashboard.
Finally, would bringing in another threat intelligence source further burden your already time-short cybersecurity teams? Will they have to deal with more alerts (and the alert fatigue that comes with it) and chase down more false positives?
The fact is, when an alert comes from CounterCraft The Platform, your team members can be sure that it’s less likely to be a false positive than anything else. This is because this intelligence concerns real attackers that are targeting your specific organization, albeit from outside your walls (for now). What’s more, the threat intelligence delivered contains actual information your security professionals can use (identities, tactics, techniques and procedures) to better protect your IT environment moving forward.
Best Practices for Seamless Integration
Now you understand the benefits of threat intelligence powered by deception and how to overcome the challenges that could arise, how do you get started integrating deception technology with your existing security system?
Integrating cyber deception technology into your existing system with minimal disruption shouldn’t be too different from when you bring in any new piece of software, especially if your solution is designed for easy setup like CounterCraft’s Platform.
The planning stage is the same. Define your objectives and map the integration you want to create. In most cases, it will be adding your deception solution to the SIEM you currently use, so the threat intelligence generated by deception will show up with the rest of your threat intelligence and create alerts in the same way.
As well as integrating with all major SIEMs, The Platform is host-based with easy cloud infrastructure integration. If your security stack is cloud-based already, there’s no need to plug into any internal network equipment.
Collaboration Between Security Teams
Getting your deception solution to communicate with your existing cybersecurity solutions shouldn’t be a problem. The real work doesn’t happen on the technical side but on the human side. The different security teams in your organization need to understand how your deception technology works, how it fits into your security stack and how to use it effectively.
Of course, all organizations will set up their security teams differently, with various names and different responsibilities, but here are some teams that will need to work with deception technology in order to gain all the benefits:
- Threat intelligence – This team will take a more strategic approach, designing deception campaigns to trap attackers. They will also work with the threat data generated, analyze it in conjunction with other threat intelligence and plot a course for the future.
- Incident response – When an attack is in progress, even when it occurs solely in the digital twin environment, it’s up to your incident response team to act. This will include addressing vulnerabilities, safeguarding data and strengthening defenses.
- IT operations – This team may be more focused on ensuring the integration of your deception technology is working well. Your deception technology must constantly communicate with your SIEM or SOAR without being too resource-heavy.
With the technical and human elements of your integration in place, you’re good to start taking the fight to cyber attackers with deception, generating specific, actionable threat intelligence and finally tilting the scales in your favour.
Continuous Monitoring and Evaluation
Once you’re up and running, all that remains is to continually monitor your deception technology integration. There’s obviously a short-term priority to keeping a close eye on the integration from a technical standpoint; you need to make sure it’s always working and generating usable threat intelligence. However, what’s more valuable is to evaluate the integration compared to how it was before you brought in threat intelligence powered by deception.
Compare the data and find out:
- The number of cyber threats neutralised thanks to threat intelligence powered by deception, compared to other means.
- How many fewer false positive alerts do your security teams have to deal with compared to before you brought in deception technology?
- How much money has your deception technology saved you by preventing potential data breaches?
At CounterCraft, our research shows that, on average, organizations save $4.6 million by using our deception-based solution. The Platform detects threats before a traditional NGAV, EDR or XDR solution, averting data breaches that would cost millions of dollars if they weren’t prevented.
As you begin to reap the rewards of threat intelligence powered by deception, ensure you know exactly how significant those rewards are.
Conclusion
Threat intelligence powered by deception is the most effective way to make your cybersecurity posture proactive, predictive and preventive. Why wait for cyber attackers to come to you (by which time, it’s already too late) when you can deceive them into revealing all their malicious tricks in an environment that’s totally safe for your organization? With early detection that enables robust incident response, deception technology can keep your organization running and save money.
While the technology is technically complex, CounterCraft makes its platform easy to set up, use and monitor. That includes integrating it with your existing security tech stack. All major SIEMs and SOARs are supported, and it works out of the box with minimal specialist knowledge required. Why wait? Get started with CounterCraft’s threat intelligence powered by deception technology today.
To find out more, visit our Solutions page.