As breaches continue to dominate the headlines, affecting organizations of all sizes, in all industries and around the world, the pressure is high for C-level executives. We talk to CISOs every day that are being challenged to reduce risk, improve defenses and execute on strategic and tactical enterprise goals while staying on budget. They are looking for ways to help their security operations centers, incident response teams and threat intelligence analysts efficiently structure, organize and use threat intelligence across the enterprise.

Due to the shortage of skilled security professionals and limited budgets, CISOs need these teams to work smarter – not harder – by turning threat intelligence into a threat operations program. This will minimize time wasted on tedious and repetitive manual tasks, and allow them work together so that they can quickly respond to threats before damage is done and effectively deploy intelligence to existing infrastructure.

We’ve designed the ThreatQ threat intelligence platform to help your teams do just this. Using ThreatQ they can:

Collect, centralize and normalize external data. Most organizations are bombarded with millions of threat-focused data points every day – some from commercial sources, some open source, some industry and some from their existing security vendors. With ThreatQ your teams can collect and manage all their external data sources in one central location and translate all this data into a uniform format to achieve a single source of truth.

Contextualize threat data, turning it into threat intelligence. To use that data effectively, context is critical. Using the ThreatQ threat intelligence platform they can correlate internal threat and event data, for example from your SIEM, log management repository and case management system, with external data on indicators, adversaries and their methods. This provides the context to understand the who, what, where, when, why and how of an attack.

Prioritize threat intelligence. All this data is great, but it can generate a lot of noise, so you need to be able to prioritize it. Some vendors try to help by publishing generic risk scores, but what’s important to one organization may be noise for you. With ThreatQ, your teams can change risk scores and prioritize based on parameters they set.

Accelerate detection and response to security incidents. With priorities set to filter out noise, your teams can focus on what really matters to your organization. Instead of wasting time and resources chasing ghosts, they’re detecting and responding to high-priority security incidents.

Deploy actionable intelligence to maximize the value of existing security infrastructure. When a threat does get through, your teams now have a single source of truth for better decisions and action. They can apply a subset of threat data specific to your environment, for example to your existing case management or SIEM solution, to allow these technologies to perform more efficiently and effectively – delivering fewer false positives. Teams can also use this curated threat intelligence to be anticipatory and prevent attacks in the future – automatically sending intelligence to your layers of defense (firewalls, IPS, etc.) to generate and apply updated policies and rules.

Reduce risk and improve security posture. Moving forward, the ThreatQ threat intelligence platform is regularly and automatically updated with pre-processed, contextual and prioritized data. Your teams can work together, adding comments about their observations to capture learnings about adversaries and their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). This continuous threat assessment helps ensure teams stay focused on what matters in your highly dynamic environment and derive the most value from threat intelligence.

Learn more about how ThreatQ helps CISOs improve defenses, reduce risk and execute on strategic goals, while getting more from existing resources – people and infrastructure.