Enhancing APT Detection Capabilities Through Threat Intelligence

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) continue to produce challenges for security teams. The ability to track and mitigate threats, such as StrongPity APT, Lazarus and the elusive Nebulae backdoor , is critical to being resilient against APTs. One of the best ways that security teams can both detect and respond to advanced threats is by using the MITRE framework. Unfortunately, these resources are not always available to security operation centers (SOCs), managed security services providers (MSSPs) or in-house security teams due to budget constraints and available high-level talent.

A marked increase in advanced attacks is why more security teams currently use a combination of information collected from conventional detection tools and actionable threat intelligence to combat cyber-attacks. Threat intelligence in conjunction with endpoint detection and response (EDR) helps to prevent complex attacks and pinpoint security vulnerabilities and indicators of compromise.

What is a Threat Intelligence Platform?

Threat intelligence represents a continuous stream of curated information on current and potential attacks and is meant to enhance threat detection capabilities with dynamic visibility. As its insights have proven effective against malware (including ransomware) and threat actors, good threat intelligence is a necessity for modern cybersecurity.

In the past, security analysts would have to leverage information from multiple sources, contextualize and qualify it to assess the potential threat landscape. As APTs grow in number and complexity, quick access to the relevant intelligence with the right context is crucial. This is where external Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP) come in.

TIPs are platforms that aggregate, analyze, and recommend action against threats, based on one or multiple feeds of threat intelligence. They act as a single source of truth for your security organization, unifying and qualifying security information, triaging events and alerts, as well as managing incident responses. A threat intelligence platform could support multiple types of real-time feeds, provide collaborative support, and be customizable enough to accommodate Security Information and Event Management (SIEMs) as well as other security measures you might have in place.

Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence

As a trusted security leader, Bitdefender benefits from a global security delivery infrastructure that protects hundreds of millions of sensors and constantly outperforms competitors in prestigious comparative tests. Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence gives you access to one of the most heavily curated and highest-quality security threat data, covering everything from suspicious URLs, IPs, domains, file hashes and certificates to Command and Control servers and Advanced Persistent Threats.

With a constantly updated database, Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence can provide first-hand, contextual intelligence to large enterprises with Security Operation Centers (SOCs), Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), Managed Detection & Response (MDR) companies, IT security and investigation consultancy organizations globally. 

How the ThreatQ platform could detect sophisticated threats

By integrating Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence with the ThreatQ Platform, security experts may now access contextual threat intelligence feeds and organize them by using a leading TIP platform, which helps them improve decision-making with accurate, near-real-time data on domains, URLs, IPs, file hashes, APTs, C&C servers and more.  Furthermore, it allows to accelerate incident response and forensic capabilities to mitigate the latest sophisticated threats. 

“Our collaboration with ThreatQuotient helps organizations become more cyber resilient as methods for evading detection become increasingly advanced,” said Andrei Florescu, vice president of product management, Bitdefender Business Solutions Group. “Threat intelligence platforms like ThreatQ greatly improve detection capabilities and situational awareness across the entire operation while prioritizing SOC activities based on threat risk and potential impact.”

How to integrate threat intelligence solutions into your business

If your business would like to employ the Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence solution through the ThreatQ platform, users can download the integration file from the ThreatQ marketplace and obtain an authentication token from the Bitdefender Threat Intelligence team. After loading the integration file into the platform and activating the authentication token, the user can now ingest the selected feeds. After adding the feeds, it is possible to organize information, manage threat scoring, and access Bitdefender’s quality threat information, as desired. Request an evaluation by e-mail at [email protected] or by visiting www.bitdefender.com/ti.

If you would like to learn more about or gain access to the ThreatQ Platform, please contact their team at [email protected].