Digital risks are all around modern organisations, from common phishing scams, to data exfiltration and leakage, copycat web pages and mobile applications, impersonating social media profiles, targeted Dark Web criminal activity, and exploitable vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

However, many companies don’t have the visibility, expertise, or resources to manage and prioritise the mitigation of these threats.

As a result, many security teams are turning to managed threat intelligence and digital risk protection services to help them work alongside analysts with specialist skills they might lack, to optimise their ability to detect and respond to these external threats, and to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. 

This article will look at some of the main reasons why organisations are turning to managed threat intelligence and digital risk protection service.

What is Threat Intelligence? 

In simple terms, threat intelligence is any type of knowledge that enables a security team to understand the threats and threat actors that can potentially target them.

Security teams use threat intelligence to: 

• Keep up to date on new threats, techniques, and vulnerabilities used by cyber criminals 
• Understand the most common threats facing their organisation, their industry, their geography and their particular infrastructure and applications.
• Inform their security strategy going forward 
• Ultimately, lower the risk of data breaches and compliance violations 

The important thing to note about threat intelligence is that the quality of threat and vulnerability management depends on the experience of security analysts and the tools they have access to.

If an organisation has an under-resourced or less experienced security team, the quality of threat intelligence and number of threats addressed will be much less than that of a better funded and more resourced security team. 

Ultimately, the better a company’s threat intelligence is, the more information they have to implement security controls and mitigate the risk of data loss in the environment to ensure that protected data isn’t disclosed. 

What is a Digital Risk Protection Service? 

A Managed Digital Risk Protection Service enables organisations to augment their existing cyber security controls with comprehensive threat detection and response that increases visibility over threats, exposures, and vulnerabilities that are external to their environment. Key use cases include

1. Data Leakage Detection: Quickly detect and respond to leaked sensitive company or customer credentials, documents or data before it turns into a major breach
2. Brand Protection: Detect and eliminate copycat domains, phishing pages targeting your customers, spoof social media accounts targeting your brand or VIPs, or copycat mobile apps
3. Attack Surface Reduction: Understand from an attackers-eye viewpoint if you have externally exposed exploitable vulnerabilities, open ports, misconfigurations, or weak/expiring certificates. Detect them if they arise at any time, so you can close the gap before an attacker takes advantage

The service provides organisations with 24/7/365 access to highly skilled and experienced security and threat intelligence analysts working in a Next Generation Security Operation Centre (SOC) that can monitor for new threats around the clock. A complete service will identify key assets in the environment, which will be monitored, while monitoring the open web, deep web, and dark web for asset exposure. 

If there’s exposure, the outsourced security team will identify the level of risk presented by the exposure and take action either instigating a takedown process, and/or providing notification to the in-house security team with remediation recommendations and advice.

Why You Need a Digital Risk Protection Service

Managed Digital Risk Protection Services are designed for organisations that want to eliminate the external threat blind spot, but don’t have the security expertise or resources in-house to discover these threats on the surface, deep, or dark web and want to gather more accurate threat intelligence.

Outsourcing the monitoring of your organisation's external attack surface to an external provider allows you to work with industry-leading experts, who can provide high-quality threat intelligence that can pinpoint what threats and vulnerabilities carry the most risk to your enterprise whilst you can prioritise remediating them first. 

The main value of working with a managed threat intelligence provider is that your internal security team can focus on addressing the most high-value security tasks and make much more significant improvements to your organisation’s security posture than they could if they were managing it in-house.

This approach is beneficial not only because it's more organised, but also because it reduces the workload of the SOC team and reduces the chance of burnout, which affects more than 70% of SOC analysts. Early warning of adversaries targeting your data, your infrastructure or your brand can make all the difference in mitigating the worst impact and avoid potentially significant costs or damage.

Integrity 360’s Approach to Managed Threat Intelligence 

Integrity 360’s Managed Digital Risk Protection Service is maintained by a group of cyber security experts with over 15 years of experience in the cyber security industry. They have a wealth of experience in hunting for the most common risks, threats and vulnerabilities that are exploited by threat actors. 

Working with an external team can help to make sure that you're implementing security best-practices in protecting your environment, and mitigating vulnerabilities at the necessary pace to prevent cyber criminals from gaining access to sensitive information. 

Want to find out how our Digital Risk Protection Service can help you detect and respond rapidly to threats across the digital ecosystem? Find out more here.