Cybersecurity Toolkit: ISAO Analyses and Threat Intelligence Feeds

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual effort by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to inform individuals and organizations about the importance of cybersecurity.

This year’s theme—Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart.—encourages organizations to own their part in protecting their cyberspace and taking proactive steps to enhance cybersecurity.

Why? Cyberspace is a scary place with ghouls plotting to prey on your customers’ data for financial and political gain. In fact, the top cyberattacks we’ll likely see this year include phishing, business email compromise (BEC), ransomware, password-related, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and IoT- and AI-based attacks. And then there are the soulless, remotely controlled zombies.

Protecting your customers from these attacks should start with an incident response strategy that includes threat intelligence.

A Community-Based Approach to Threat Intelligence

There are too many threats, threat actors and new threat vectors for any organization to fend off alone, particularly with a looming worldwide cybersecurity skills gap.

As a result, the CISA established, by Presidential order, Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) in 2015. ISAO communities allow companies, local governments, and security professionals to collaborate, share intelligence and provide training under the auspices of mutual non-disclosure agreements.

In other words, information about past, current and future threats is collected and analyzed, enabling community members to freely share timely, highly relevant analyses with each other and mount a defense against potential attacks.

The Value of Analysis to a Proper Defense

An effective defense requires real-time visibility into and analyses of the looming threats that pose a risk to your customers’ infrastructures. It also enables you to distinguish between false positives and advanced threats so you can effectively respond, isolate the risk and shore up your customer’s security systems before an attack occurs.

The goal is to provide insights into various threat vectors, enabling you to help your customers mitigate risk and protect their networks with the right defenses.

 Benefits of ISAOs for Your Customers

We’ve already hinted at the value that ISAOs deliver. Organizations can stay focused on their core business, while relying on expert cybersecurity professionals who use a threat intelligence solution like Tech Data’s RECON ISAO to provide:

• Cost-effective threat intelligence – Ensure that your customers have access to the most comprehensive threat intelligence, not expensive threat intelligence feeds that draw from a small pool of collaborators.
• Real-time indicators of compromise (IOCs) – Reliably deliver attacker IP addresses, hashes of malware, phishing, and spam infrastructure directly to your customers or to their SIEM or firewalls—without false positives.
• Secure and private communications – Share and collaborate on intelligence and ask questions via a secure and confidential communications platform.
• Education and technical resources – Provide customers with a private portal filled with educational references, technical documents and other resources, including exclusive access to technical workshops and conferences.

How You Benefit

As your customer’s managed security services provider (MSSP), you can extend your portfolio with a security competency or expand the sale with ISAO membership and potentially earn recurring revenue and higher margins for your business.

Talk to your customers about their incident response plans and let them know the value of adding comprehensive threat intelligence. Download this infographic to learn more about community-based ISAOs and how they enable threat intelligence that mitigates business risk. Or, visit techdata.com/security.

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