In the words of Sun Tzu, a renowned military strategist who lived during the Zhou dynasty of ancient China, “know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster.”
These timeless words hold true in the world of information security.
The modern threat landscape is diverse, complex and constantly evolving. In the same way that businesses vary in their sector, products, customer bases, infrastructure and size, the threat actors that target those businesses differ in their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs), their motivations, their targets, their Command and Control (C2) infrastructure, and more.
It is for this reason that businesses must prioritise their defences and place emphasis on the threat actors who are most likely to target them. Threat intelligence helps businesses to know their enemy – who they are, their objectives, and the TTPs they are known or reasonably suspected to use.
The least damaging way to determine whether a business is adequately protected against the TTPs of a known threat actor is via threat emulation – a process carried out by offensive security professionals who are trained to utilise pre-existing threat intelligence to emulate the behaviour of a particular threat actor. In a sense, threat emulation (in conjunction with other processes such as gap analysis and penetration testing) helps businesses to know themselves.
Penetration testing and gap analysis are both extremely important in identifying organisational strengths and weaknesses, but without actionable intelligence on the threats most relevant to one’s business, and without a proper threat emulation capability, defence prioritisation represents a significant challenge.
Here at ISD Cyber, we understand the indispensability of threat intelligence to offensive security, and aim to ensure that not a single one of our clients is left in the dark.
Contact us for more information.