Introduction to threat intelligence

It was clear in the last chapter that having a strong detection system is imperative for your organization’s security posture. One way to improve this system would be to reduce the noise and number of false positives that are detected. One of the main challenges that you face when you have many alerts and logs to review is that you end up randomly prioritizing – and in some cases, even ignoring – future alerts because you believe it is not worth reviewing them. According to Microsoft’s Lean on the Machine report, an average large organization has to look through 17,000 malware alerts each week, taking on average 99 days for an organization to discover a security breach.

Alert triage usually happens at the Network Operations Center (NOC) level or Security Operations Center (SOC), and delays to triage can lead to a domino effect. This is because if triage fails at this level, the operation will also fail, and in this...