Alexander Graham Bell said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” Intellectually and in our gut, we all know this is true. The problem is that preparation can take a lot of time. Too much time in fact. And before you know it, your chance for success may have passed you by.

Analysts in Security Operations Centers (SOCs) know this all too well. SOC teams are charged with constantly monitoring and assessing their networks to uncover which data is relevant and important to the environment. But before you can really get to this primary task – validating, verifying and prioritizing alerts and response efforts – you must sift through a massive amount of threat data. Most of that data, both internally collected and externally sourced, along with the alerts that flood SOC dashboards, are just noise.

How can you quickly detect and respond to real threats when you’re manually copying and pasting threat data from emails or spreadsheets? Or opening-up window after window of third-party indicator research? Or sifting through noise and false positives from irrelevant or low priority threats?

You need a streamlined way to manage and enrich threat intelligence so that you can make better decisions faster to protect your infrastructure. We’ve designed the ThreatQ threat intelligence platform to help SOC teams address this challenge. Using ThreatQ you can:

Collect and prioritize threat data. ThreatQ automatically aggregates structured and unstructured data from all your disparate sources into a threat library. It overlays context from your internal threat and event data as well as information on adversaries and their methods. ThreatQ also allows you to customize threat intelligence scores based on parameters you set. When coupled with context, this customized scoring allows for prioritization based on what’s relevant to your specific environment.

Create and warehouse threat intelligence. Now that you’ve turned threat data into threat intelligence, you can use ThreatQ to centralize storage for rapid processing and look-ups. No more manual threat data look-up or analysis, or “guesstimating” threat analysis or response priorities. With information at your fingertips, active threat hunting campaigns are more effective and the SOC team can spend more time on high-value objectives.

Automatically add, correlate and collect rich context. Adding more data and context over time, ThreatQ’s self-tuning threat library empowers the SOC with continuous threat assessment capabilities. You can also capture what the team has learned about adversaries and their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and maintain adversary dossiers. Recalculating and reevaluating priorities based on a continuous flow of new data and learnings helps improve situational awareness so that you can stay focused on higher priority threats.

Expire benign or old indicators of compromise. Threat intelligence has a shelf life, but many organizations don’t know where to begin to define a threat data lifecycle or expiration strategy. ThreatQ supports various proven strategies you can use and continue to refine as your threat operations program matures. For example, starting with expiration based on source and indicator type and then, over time, expanding your model with sophisticated aging algorithms.

Deploy actionable data to your security infrastructure and tools. The ThreatQ threat intelligence platform can also make your entire security infrastructure more effective. For example, you can automatically apply a subset of threat data that has been curated into threat intelligence, directly to your SIEM to generate fewer false positives. You can also automatically send all your curated threat intelligence to your security infrastructure to harden your sensor grid for better protection against future threats.

Alexander Graham Bell was right about the importance of preparation, and ThreatQ can help. By lightening the operational burden and reducing time spent on manual tasks, ThreatQ helps ensure SOC teams are prepared for success – accelerating detection and response to better protect the organization. Learn more.