How OSINT benefits cyber threat intelligence

How can cyberthreat hunters and analysts leverage OSINT? We asked Jake Williams, SANS instructor and President and Founder of Rendition Infosec

Jake Williams, a U.S. Army veteran, is a former Network Exploitation operator with the Department of Defense. His expertise includes secure network design, penetration testing, incident response, forensics, and malware reverse engineering.

The short interview (6 min.) on navigating the open, deep, and dark web for cyber threat intelligence was conducted by Nick Espinoza, Head of Special Services at Authentic8, and recorded as Part 1 of a video mini-series discussing various methods, OSINT tools and techniques of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI).

The conversations in this series highlight practical aspects of OSINT collection and management covered in-depth by Authentic8’s 2020 Cyber Threat Intelligence Survey. Its results will be presented on March 19th in a webinar designed to provide CTI practitioners with best practices and guidelines for OSINT research across the open, deep, and dark web.

A few of the questions touched upon by Nick and Jake in this first video:

• What are the most relevant resources for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)?
• What’s the value of dark web monitoring?
• What are the hurdles, concerns and risks of using TOR that threat hunters and security analysts face who need to conduct critical dark web research?

Spoiler alert: “Dark web data tends to be very, very high value,” says Jake Williams (which answers question #2), “although for many organizations, [it] is a big challenge for them to get access.”

To prevent and mitigate data breaches and thwart cyber attacks, IT security professionals need access to tools and resources that enable them to identify threat actors and indicators of compromise early on.

Watch as the SANS instructor explains what often gets in the way and also provides a recent example why cyber threat intelligence professionals owe it to their internal or external clients to overcome such hurdles.

This short video can only scratch the surface. so mark your calendar and register here for our 1-hour webinar on March 19th, when a panel of four industry experts will discuss the CTI 2020 survey findings and how CTI professionals can leverage them.

Every attendee will receive a copy of the Cybersecurity Insider report: Cyber Threat Intelligence Survey 2020