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Cybersecurity as an Industry: A Cyber Threat Intelligence Perspective

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The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance

Abstract

The rapid integration of information technology has been met with an alarming rate of cyber-attacks conducted by malicious hackers using sophisticated exploits. Many organizations have aimed to develop timely, relevant, and actionable cyber threat intelligence (CTI) about emerging threats and key threat actors to enable effective cybersecurity decisions. To streamline and create efficient and effective CTI capabilities, many major cybersecurity companies such as FireEye, Anomali, ThreatConnect, McAfee, CyLance, ZeroFox, and numerous others have aimed to develop CTI platforms, enabling an unprecedented ability to prioritize threats; pinpoint key threat actors; understand their tools, techniques, and procedures (TTP); deploy appropriate security controls; and ultimately, improve overall cybersecurity hygiene. Given the significant benefits of such platforms, our objective for this chapter is to provide a systematic review of existing CTI platforms within industry today. Such a review can offer significant value to academics across multiple disciplines (e.g., sociology, computational linguistics, computer science, information systems, and information science) and industry professionals across public and private sectors. Systematically reviewing existing CTI platforms identified five future possible directions CTI start-ups can explore: (1) shift from reactive to proactive OSINT-based CTI platforms, (2) enhancement of natural language processing (NLP) and text mining capabilities, (3) enhancement of data mining capabilities, (4) further integration of big data and cloud computing technologies, and (5) opportunities and strategies for academia to address identified gaps.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by NSF CRII CNS-1850362.

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Correspondence to Victor Benjamin .

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Samtani, S., Abate, M., Benjamin, V., Li, W. (2020). Cybersecurity as an Industry: A Cyber Threat Intelligence Perspective. In: Holt, T., Bossler, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78440-3_8

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