RAV Antivirus Threat Intelligence Center Prevents Cyberattacks

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Threat intelligence is a crucial to mitigating cybersecurity attacks. The antivirus system you use must have threat intelligence in order to identify new threats early. In this way, you will be ready for any attack.

The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving. A system that we consider secure today can instantly become insecure tomorrow with a newly discovered vulnerability.

Security professionals and malicious entities are continuously trying to get an edge over one another. While one party is trying to mitigate security vulnerabilities, the other party is actively exploiting those vulnerabilities.

This is where RAV Antivirus comes into play. Let’s explore what threat intelligence is and how to use RAV Antivirus to mitigate security attacks.

Threat Intelligence Defined

Threat intelligence is the information that helps us understand the threats an organization or an entity may face. It is a collection of data that professionals can process and analyze to understand an attacker’s motives, targets, and behaviors. For example, the RAV Antivirus team maintains massive databases to investigate threats. These databases are capable of scanning more than two billion files per day.

This information helps the RAV Antivirus team to quickly make informed, data-backed security decisions to protect against potential future cyber attacks. They can also use this data as a predictive metric. Therefore, users can take a proactive approach to security. In other words, they can make adjustments to potential threat vectors even before a vulnerability is identified or an attack is discovered.

Types of Threat Intelligence

There are different types of threat intelligence, from high-level non-technical information to highly technical information. Threat intelligence provides details about specific attacks and vulnerabilities and categorizes these details as follows:

Strategic

This is high-level non-technical information. It provides an overview of threats and describes what kind of effect they can have on the organization.

Tactical

This type of intelligence includes information on how attackers could carry out a threat. Further, this type of intelligence provides information about how to defend against these attacks. These details could include attack vectors, tools, and the technologies the attackers might use. Then cybersecurity professionals use this information to make decisions relating to security controls and mitigation strategies.

Operational

This is the first level of technical information, such as attack behavior and an attacker’s possible targets. The RAV Antivirus system rapidly updates this information to quickly diagnose and protect against a specific attack as well as similar ones.

Technical

This type of intelligence includes the most technical information, such as specific evidence of an attack and indicators of compromise.

The Importance of Understanding Threats

Threat intelligence is the key to becoming proactive about security. Due to the rapidly evolving nature of threats, a reactive approach to security is inadequate. It fails to meet the challenges of the modern security landscape.

Threat intelligence provides users with an understanding of security vulnerabilities, threat indicators, attack vectors, and attack behaviors. It provides an understanding of how bad actors can carry out attacks at an organizational level. With this information, users can strengthen their environments and implement further security controls for all aspects of their organization.

All of this allows users to be better prepared to face any kind of attack. It even helps them minimize the effects of a new type of attack coming from an unexpected vector. Another aspect that benefits the community as a whole is that by sharing new intelligence with the wider cybersecurity community, users will be helping to build better security measures. They can thus help to reduce the damage that malicious entities can cause.

How to Use Threat Intelligence Tools

The best way to create and utilize threat intelligence is through a lifecycle that collects and processes data into actionable intelligence. This lifecycle consists of a continuous six-step process:

Defining the Requirements

This stage lays out the roadmap for the threat intelligence workflow. In this stage, we determine the following:

What type of data are you going to gather?
How will you analyze that data?
What do you expect the outcomes from the analysis will be?

Furthermore, at this stage, we identify information such as attack vectors and vulnerable systems. We also identify types of attackers and their motivations. We can then figure out preventive and defensive actions.

Collecting Data for Threat Intelligence

Depending on the requirements, users gather data relevant to threat intelligence from multiple sources. There are mainly two types of sources. Networking and firewall logs are examples of internal sources. External sources would include malware databases, subject matter experts, and social media.

Data Processing

After all the data has been collected and aggregated, it is processed into a format suitable for analysis. In this process, unreliable or non-relevant data is discarded. The data is cleaned and formatted so that it is processable for threat intelligence. Then we evaluate the data for reliability.

Analysis

Users can analyze the processed data set to find answers to the questions or outcomes they specified in the requirement stage. This will entail deciphering the data set to identify valuable and actionable information about threats, attack behaviors, preventive measures, and so on.

Dissemination

After the analysis, users translate the findings—such as threats, preventive measures, and recommendations—into a digestible format so that relevant parties at different levels can use this information. For example, stakeholders will use high-level information while security professionals will use technical information.

Obtaining Feedback

The final stage is to obtain feedback on the results of the threat intelligence lifecycle. Depending on the feedback, the RAV antivirus team will plan the next lifecycle to better meet the organization’s requirements and outcomes.

Continuously evaluating threat intelligence is the key to preventing cybersecurity attacks. With an updated threat outlook, users can easily increase their systems’ overall security posture. Most antivirus providers like RAV Antivirus tend to conduct threat intelligence frequently in order to keep track of new threats.

How RAV Antivirus Threat Intelligence Guards Your Organization

Threat intelligence has become a must-have tool to prevent cybersecurity attacks. However, most organizations or entities don’t have the resources or time to carry out this type of analysis continuously.

This is where a comprehensive security solution like RAV Antivirus comes in. Its threat intelligence research arm includes features such as algorithms with machine learning capabilities. They help to protect and prevent cybersecurity attacks with minimal burden to the end user.