Understand the threats targeting you
Cyber threat actors and tactics are constantly changing and adapting to defensive measures, complicating the lives of security professionals. To properly understand the threats it faces, an organization must identify its specific security goals, business vertical, geography, high-value targets (critical assets), historical threat activity, and defensive posture. These efforts require regular maintenance and should combine both an internal and external point of view for holistic understanding and useful specificity.
The Mandiant Cyber Threat Profile gives you a composite picture of the most important and relevant cyber threats to your organization and how those threats are likely to materialize and impact you and your partners, now and in the future. The Cyber Threat Profile is an essential part of an intelligence-led security strategy — one that creates a proactive defensive posture to reduce cyber risk.
Benefits of a Cyber Threat Profile
A Cyber Threat Profile has strategic, operational and tactical benefits, including:
• Arm executives with a thorough understanding of cyber threats to guide security investments.
• Bridge threat communication gaps between business and security operations teams.
• Review security architecture decisions based on attacker motivation, capability, and intent.
• Enhance threat modeling processes through incorporation of pertinent attacker profiles.
• Reduce responder stress by effectively scoping investigations.
• Go beyond CVE scoring by integrating threat intelligence into vulnerability management activities.
Collectively, the benefits of a cyber threat profile enable you to make security decisions based on cyber risk rather than best practices or instinct.
Highlights
Anticipate changes to your organizational risk profile based on changing threat factors:
• Provide situational awareness to leadership teams, cyber defense, and enterprise risk functions to guide security strategy and investments.
• Proactively prepare operational teams through targeted training exercises against real threats.
• Validate technology against the capabilities and tactics of adversaries.
• Map organizational high-value targets to threat actors based on the vulnerabilities and malware leveraged.
• Survey internal network telemetry to uncover active or past unauthorized access.
A cyber threat profile is a critical component to a holistic cybersecurity strategy. It can serve multiple organizational personas and be a central input and driver for other threat management activities, such as threat modeling, security validation, threat hunting, red teaming, penetration testing, and tabletop exercises. Before beginning, it is important to understand the desired outcome. Mandiant intelligence experts build cyber threat profiles at three different levels. Based on Mandiant’s experience developing these profiles over many years, not every customer will require the same approach, which generally corresponds to the threat fidelity desired. Each level builds upon the previous levels threat fidelity and includes all prior deliverables.
Cyber Threat Intelligence functions must take a leading role in managing organizational threats. Business and cyber defenders need up-to-date intelligence to inform their specific decision-making processes. Those that fail to do so will have trouble consistently realizing value from intelligence and may ultimately decrease operational efficiency. The Cyber Threat Profile is your first step to becoming an intelligence-led organization.
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