A Shared Cyber Threat Intelligence Solution for SMEs

A Systematic Literature Review on Cyber Threat Intelligence for Organizational Cybersecurity Resilience

Cybersecurity is a significant concern for businesses worldwide, as cybercriminals target business data and system resources. Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) enhances organizational cybersecurity resilience by obtaining, processing, evaluating, and disseminating information about potential risks and opportunities inside the cyber domain. This research investigates how companies can employ CTI to improve their precautionary measures against security breaches. The study follows a systematic review methodology, including selecting primary studies based on specific criteria and quality valuation of the selected papers. As a result, a comprehensive framework is proposed for implementing CTI in organizations. The proposed framework is comprised of a knowledge base, detection models, and visualization dashboards. The detection model layer consists of behavior-based, signature-based, and anomaly-based detection. In contrast, the knowledge base layer contains information resources on possible threats, vulnerabilities, and dangers to key assets. The visualization dashboard layer provides an overview of key metrics related to cyber threats, such as an organizational risk meter, the number of attacks detected, types of attacks, and their severity level. This relevant systematic study also provides insight for future studies, such as how organizations can tailor their approach to their needs and resources to facilitate more effective collaboration between stakeholders while navigating legal/regulatory constraints related to information sharing.

Research on the Effectiveness of Cyber Security Awareness in ICS Risk Assessment Frameworks

Assessing security awareness among users is essential for protecting industrial control systems (ICSs) from social engineering attacks. This research aimed to determine the effect of cyber security awareness on the emergency response to cyber security incidents in the ICS. Additionally, this study has adopted a variety of cyber security emergency response process measures and frameworks and comprehensively proposes a new organizational model of cyber security incident response. The corresponding measures are evaluated based on the MP2DR2 risk control matrix model to assess their practical value in the evaluation stage. This study found that after adding security awareness measures to response control measures, the influential value ranking of other control measures changed. The practical value of security awareness control measures was given a higher priority than that of other control measures. The research results highlight the importance of cyber security awareness and aim to inspire ICSs to place a higher priority on staff cyber security awareness in relation to cyber security incidents, which can effectively prevent the occurrence of cyber security incidents and make the field of industrial control application agency respond to incidents faster to restore the regular progress of all works.

Correction: van Haastrecht et al. A Shared Cyber Threat Intelligence Solution for SMEs. Electronics 2021, 10, 2913

The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper [...]

Methodological Framework to Collect, Process, Analyze and Visualize Cyber Threat Intelligence Data

Cyber attacks have increased in frequency in recent years, affecting small, medium and large companies, creating an urgent need for tools capable of helping the mitigation of such threats. Thus, with the increasing number of cyber attacks, we have a large amount of threat data from heterogeneous sources that needs to be ingested, processed and analyzed in order to obtain useful insights for their mitigation. This study proposes a methodological framework to collect, organize, filter, share and visualize cyber-threat data to mitigate attacks and fix vulnerabilities, based on an eight-step cyber threat intelligence model with timeline visualization of threats information and analytic data insights. We developed a tool to address needs in which the cyber security analyst can insert threat data, analyze them and create a timeline to obtain insights and a better contextualization of a threat. Results show the facilitation of understanding the context in which the threats are inserted, rendering the mitigation of vulnerabilities more effective.