Cyber Threat Intelligence Support to Incident Handling

Recent research has shown increased awareness of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) capabilities. However, CTI teams continue to be underutilized and have had difficulty demonstrating the value they can add to digital forensics incident response (DFIR) teams. Meta-analysis of multiple surveys will identify where the gaps in knowledge exist. The paper will suggest how CTI can support DFIR at each level of intelligence and operations tactical, operational, and strategic and during each phase of the incident response lifecycle preparation; detection and analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery; and lessons learned. CTI teams should have priority intelligence requirements (PIRs) and a collection plan that supports answering those PIRs. In return, DFIR needs to share investigations and incident reports with the CTI team to reduce risk to the organization, decrease the time to detect an incident and decrease the time to remediate an incident. This paper builds on previous work by the author to develop CTI processes to support CTI planning.