This year challenged CISOs, CSOs, and IT teams like never before. With many companies transitioning quickly to remote-only work earlier this year, organizations, employees, and consumers have faced a correlative and dramatic growth in cybercrime, brand abuse, scams, and spear-phishing attacks. While some businesses had robust and resilient cybersecurity processes in place before the pandemic, many found themselves ill-equipped to address the increase in threat activity and rapid shifts in adversarial behavior. Correspondingly, successful decision-makers have discovered just how valuable threat intelligence services are in supporting business continuity, defending brand reputation, and ensuring consumer trust.
But building a cyber-resilient enterprise informed by threat intelligence is not an easy task. Risks and requirements are often as unique and diverse as organizations themselves. Determining factors like industry, size, and market contribute to one simple truth: a one-size-fits-all approach to incorporating threat intelligence does not exist. Some invariants, however, do remain; successful threat intelligence programs must staff the right people in the right positions. Below, I’ll introduce four core threat intelligence focuses to consider as businesses plan and allocate budgets for 2021: