MITRE Engenuity initially developed threat-informed defense, a community-based approach that uses an understanding of adversary technology and tradecraft to protect against, detect, and mitigate cyber attacks. MITRE Engenuity operates the MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense, a non-profit, privately funded research and development organization that aims to advance the practice of TID globally. The center provides open-source tools and resources to help the cyber community thwart network intruders, build resilience against future attacks, and develop assurance to overcome vulnerabilities.
“Threat-Informed Defense is the systematic application of a deep understanding of adversary tradecraft and technology to improve defenses.”
- The Center for Threat-Informed Defense
KEY BENEFITS OF THREAT-INFORMED DEFENSE
As you develop a TID program, you build a long-term understanding of adversaries and their evolution, enabling your team to stay one step ahead. The adoption of TID offers significant advantages:
- Reduced Exposures and Risk: Risk is the product of probability and impact. By focusing on real-world threats, organizations can prioritize their resources towards the areas that will significantly reduce their risk profile and prioritize remediating the most damaging vulnerabilities.
- Increased Efficiency: TID allows for a more targeted approach to cybersecurity, eliminating the need to address every possible threat equally. By understanding the adversary, you can prioritize your defenses and continually assess them to identify gaps in your defensive program.
- Enhanced Response Capabilities: Organizations can develop more effective incident response plans and strategies by clearly understanding the threats they face.
How To Operationalize Threat-Informed Defense Strategy
Cyber Threat Intelligence
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is the backbone of any successful TID program. It involves collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information about current and potential attacks that threaten an organization.
Testing & Evaluation
Testing and evaluation bring the adversary perspective to life by simulating real-world attacks on your systems to evaluate the effectiveness of your security posture. Including this element in your strategy helps identify weaknesses in your defenses before attackers exploit them.
Defensive Measures
The defensive measures pillar in TID involves prioritizing vulnerabilities, enhancing detection capabilities, and creating dynamic response strategies. By focusing on the most relevant threats, organizations can allocate resources effectively and defend against the most likely attack vectors.
Challenges In Building A Threat-Informed Defense Strategy
Building a Threat-Informed Defense program presents several challenges.
These are some of the common challenges organizations tend to face:
Collection analysis and actioning CTI require significant resources, including time, personnel, and financial investment.
Keeping pace with the adversary demands continuous monitoring and analysis, which can be overwhelming without automated processes.
Accurate and effective threat analysis requires expertise and technical skills that may be scarce within an organization.
Integrating intelligence across an organization’s technology environment and among various teams can be complex due to differences in priorities and expertise.
Despite these challenges...
The benefits of adopting a TID approach outweigh the difficulties.
Organizations that implement TID programs are better equipped to anticipate, prevent,
and respond to cyber threats effectively.
The Future of Threat-Informed Defense
As cyber threats continue to evolve, so must our approaches to defending against them. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) emerges as a critical component of TID. CTEM involves continuously assessing and managing an organization’s assets’ exposure to cyber threats, ensuring that defenses remain aligned with intelligence on threats and vulnerabilities adversaries are targeting and exploiting.
“Leveraging knowledge of cyber threats to prioritize the allocation of limited resources is one of the most impactful and efficient ways to reduce overall risk.”
- The Center for Threat-Informed Defense
Source: M3TID Project Summary, Published by MITRE-Engenuity - April 10, 2024
How Interpres Security Can Operationalize Your Threat-Informed Defense and CTEM Program
Interpres Security stands at the forefront of enabling organizations ability to understand exposure risk against known and emerging threats prioritized to an organization’s bespoke characteristics. Our solution automatically analyzes trending threat intelligence and automates MITRE ATT&CK analysis to help organizations rapidly measure exposure from an asset and vulnerability perspective while simultaneously analyzing defensive readiness from a security tooling perspective. Interpres leverages the tools that you already own to seamlessly fuse disparate technologies and teams, breaking down silos and unifying your defense strategy. Through continuous assessment, Interpres Security ensures that your organization remains resilient against the cyber actors that pose the biggest threat to your business operations.
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