Proactive and reactive cybersecurity methods work hand in hand to shield your organization from various threat actors. Both protect your sensitive information from malicious parties. However, you must pay extra attention to your proactive security strategy.

The devil you don’t know is more dangerous than the devil you know. Concentrating on discovering unknown threats and stopping attacks before they happen can spare you from potentially eye-watering data breaches. To ensure your proactive cybersecurity strategy works like a charm, maximize threat intelligence.

Threat Intelligence — Why It's Useful for Playing Offense

Threat intel is helpful for plugging cybersecurity gaps and eliminating blind spots attackers exploit to heist employees’ personal data on file and closely guarded trade secrets. This actionable information is also instrumental in hunting down non-remediated known threats and uncovering those not yet found in the wild.

Operational or technical threat intelligence outlines the tactics, techniques and procedures known threat actors use, describing their behaviors and the assets they target. Strategic threat intel informs non-IT decision-makers about geopolitical issues and cybersecurity trends that may compromise businesses, aiding organizational risk management.

Devising a Proactive Security Strategy With Threat Intel

While creating a threat intelligence-centric proactive cybersecurity strategy that makes sense for your organization requires significant deliberation, adopting these measures can get you started.

Ingrain Threat Intelligence in Existing Processes

Integrating your cyberthreat intel platform into the security technologies you already have goes without saying. Actionable insights are less practical when siloed.

Use a solution capable of aggregating data from various sources and producing machine-readable intelligence. Such a platform can seamlessly talk with other software and make it easy to feed the intel to multiple programs — crucial to cohesive proactive cybersecurity strategy development.

Some threat intelligence platforms are more integrative than others. Choose one that uses an open-source standard to ensure broad interoperability, giving you more flexibility when switching solutions to strengthen your cyberdefenses.

Snoop on the Dark Web

The most inaccessible corner of the internet is the best place to learn about cyberthreats most of the world hasn’t heard of. It’s where black-hat hackers ply their trade and compare notes.

Sniffing around seedy underground hacker forums for conversations about new vulnerabilities and exploits. Getting the inside scoop on unorthodox attacks is key to outsmarting brilliant criminals and foreign government hackers who attack businesses operating in areas of national economic importance.

Spying on threat actors on the dark web requires proper tools, skill and experience. After all, it takes more than infiltrating virtually impregnable spaces — it’s also about obtaining intel when it’s relevant. Data collection timeliness is vital in getting an updated portrait of the cyberthreat landscape.

Some threat intelligence programs can scour the dark web. However, only some can promptly analyze their findings.

Prioritize High-Stakes Vulnerabilities

Constantly patching everything is unrealistic because your security team has limited bandwidth.
Getting a deluge of notifications regularly can lead to alert fatigue, desensitizing the people who must always be on their toes to counter an attack when it occurs.

Heighten your alert threshold to avoid overwhelming your cybersecurity team. Use your finite resources wisely — especially when economic conditions cause you to cut your budget — to fix the vulnerabilities that will hurt your organization dearly. Prioritizing the most financially damaging weak spots in your programs and IT system means making compromises is inevitable — so be it. Cybersecurity is about minimizing losses since you can never be entirely safe from attacks.

Which is worth prioritizing more — known or unknown threats? Threat actors target older software vulnerabilities more frequently than their newer counterparts. This behavior suggests that long-established known weaknesses expose your organization more to criminals than recently disclosed and unknown ones.

Go on the Offensive to Boost Your Cybersecurity

Offense can be the best defense because a solid proactive security strategy can prepare you for cyberattacks you never see coming. Leverage threat intelligence by incorporating it into your existing technologies, bolstering your data collection and prioritizing the more critical vulnerabilities to neutralize attacks before they happen.

As senior editor of Modded.com, Jack Shaw offers a unique perspective on the integration of new technology in architecture. His articles delve into how cutting-edge materials and techniques shape modern building designs, and have been published in GearBrain, EPS News, Advanced Manufacturing and more.