Understanding the components of Cyber Threat Analysis

There is an increase in the demand for cyber threat intelligence professionals. However, the supply of skilled and capable cybersecurity intelligence analyst is still limited. According to market reports, the threat intelligence market is estimated to grow from USD5.3 billion in 2018 to USD12.9 billion by 2023. This shows now is the best time to join the cyber threat analysis industry.

What is cyber analysis?

Cyber threat analysis is the method where knowledge of internal and external information weaknesses of a particular organization are tested against real-world cyberattacks. A cyber analysis method is a threat-oriented approach for combating cyberattacks that shows a change from reactive security to proactive security.

Furthermore, the result of cyber intelligence analysis will then give an organization the best practices on maximizing the protecting instruments with respect to availability, integrity, and confidentiality without having to turn back to usability and functionality conditions.

What is threat analysis?

A threat analysis is a process used by cybersecurity threat analysts to determine the components of a system that needs to be protected and the type of security threats to protect the component against. Furthermore, you can use the information to determine the strategic locations in network architecture and design to reasonably and effectively implement security.

The Importance of Cyber Threat Analysis

What is cyber threat modeling?

Cyber threat modeling is a structured process that can determine potential security threats and weaknesses, decide how serious the threat and implement techniques for mitigating the attack and protecting IT resources.

Furthermore, the most important thing about the threat model is that it is systematic and structured. This implies that threat modelers follow a series of steps in understanding the environment they are trying to secure while identifying weaknesses and potential attackers.

Cyber Threat Analysis Process and Components

According to a software engineer Goran Aviani, a threat analysis’s goal is to answer four questions, namely:

• What are we working on?
• What are the things that can go wrong?
• How do we go about problems that occur?
• Did we do a good job?

Components of the Cyber Threat Analysis Process

This then implies that the modeling process needs to follow four broad steps that produce answers to the questions above.

1. Scope

The first step in any cyber threat analysis should be to identify the assets you want to safeguard from cyberattacks and are critical to business processes.

2. Collection of Data

In the Collection of Data stage, information about an actual cyber-attack or threat incidents is collected. In this stage, you must distinguish between real potential attacks and threats that are not real but still considered potential threats. The scope should help filter out such threats to ensure that the focus is on the threats that exist.

3. Vulnerability Analysis of Acceptable Risks

In this phase, the analysts test the information gathered to determine the extent of current exposure. Existing security defense is then tested to decide whether or not it can neutralize information threats in terms of integrity, availability, and confidentiality.

4. Mitigation and Anticipation

In the final step, a highly qualified cyber threat analyst uses the information gathered from the previous sector to determine preventive measures that must be implemented. The analyst can categorize the threat data into groups, allocate each pattern to specific threat actors, and implement mitigation measures. At the same time, the analyst will use data about potential threats to anticipate future cyber attacks.

Conclusion

As you can see, a business needs to plan a cybersecurity strategy and integrate threat intelligence. If you like to play a key role in enabling this process, there are lots of threat analysis training that you can join.