Challenges & Opportunities in Cyber Threat Intelligence with Brian Kime

Brian Kime, VP of Intelligence Strategy and Advisory at ZeroFox, talks about all things threat intelligence this week. Brian explains why he chose threat intelligence as his focus, where he’s seen opportunities for growth in recent years, and what challenges for cyber threat intelligence lie ahead. Using his intelligence experience developed first in the US Army Special Forces, Brian delivers his argument for intelligence-driven security, instead of the marketing-driven security industry we have today.

Timecoded Guide:

[00:00] Diving into the VP of Intelligence Strategy role

[05:25] Learning intelligence in the Army Special Forces

[10:09] Seeing the past, present, & future of threat intelligence

[19:31] Measuring efficacy & ROI of cyber threat data

[25:18] Building your own cyber threat intelligence capabilities

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A lot of folks shift from intelligence into other areas of cyber, what inspired you to continue down the intelligence route?

After Brian graduated from Georgia Tech and the nation experienced the tragedy of 9/11, Brian felt called to enlist in the US Army Reserve. While the war in Afghanistan was not as short-lived as anyone expected, Brian found his calling in military intelligence, where he was inspired to put his experiences in IT and intelligence together. It turns out that fusion already existed in the form of cyber threat intelligence, and Brian wanted to focus on that completely.

“I want to bring all these things together and really start pushing our customers and pushing the security community in general towards more intelligence-driven security. Mostly, what I see even today still just feels like marketing-driven security.”

Where are we today with threat intelligence technology, in terms of challenges and opportunities?

Brian believes we’re already in a really exciting place today in terms of threat intelligence technology. What feels especially opportune for him at the moment includes opportunities and technology that involve internal data from previous threats, freely available external data from sources like blogs, and third-party vendors. However, the challenges facing threat intelligence now involve how to make that technology available for small and medium businesses.

“That's what I would love to see become the standard, that big corporations incorporate threat intelligence to the level that they can start to actually extend that value into their supply chain. That way, the whole system becomes more resilient, more secure.”

How does a security team measure the efficacy and ROI of intelligence?

In Brian’s opinion, most cybersecurity practitioners don't track the ROI of their intelligence vendors, or they fail to measure intelligence for effectiveness. The metrics cyber teams should focus on include number of new detections created, incidents discovered, adversary dwell time, and improved security decision making. Unfortunately, improved decision making is the hardest to measure because it requires practitioner feedback.

“At the end of the day, if stakeholders are making security decisions based on intelligence that I'm providing, that's a really good measure of effectiveness. All the security decisions that were influenced by threat intelligence, that's what we're going for.”

When you don't have an intelligence capability and you want to create one, what is typically the first thing that an intelligence team member does?

If you’re intending to collect data from your customers (which almost every company out there is trying to do), then Brian believes that privacy and security need to be considered from the start. Critical security controls and a solid framework are key to early success for even the smallest security team. The best place to start? Software and hardware inventory. If you don’t know what you have, you won’t be able to secure your technology properly.

“At the beginning of the critical security controls, it's always software and hardware inventory. If I don't know what I have, then I really can't do anything well in security. I can't do incident response because I don't know where my data is.”

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