How do you use threat intelligence to inform patching?

2 Gather threat intelligence sources

To use threat intelligence to inform your patching, you need to gather relevant and reliable sources of information. These sources can come from internal systems and networks, external vendors, partners, or peers, or open public sources such as blogs or social media. You should collect and evaluate these sources based on their relevance, timeliness, accuracy, and credibility. It's important to use a variety of sources to avoid bias or misinformation. Internal sources can help you identify assets, vulnerabilities, exposures, and signs of compromise or malicious activity. External sources can help you learn about the latest threats, trends, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers as well as any indicators of compromise (IOCs) or vulnerabilities that affect your industry or sector. Open sources can provide situational awareness and context about the threat landscape and the motivations and intentions of attackers.

3 Analyze threat intelligence data

Once you have gathered threat intelligence sources, it is important to analyze them to extract meaningful and actionable insights. To do this, you can use a combination of automated and manual analysis, along with various tools and methods such as data normalization, enrichment, correlation, and prioritization. Additionally, frameworks or methodologies such as the Cyber Kill Chain, the MITRE ATT&CK, or the Diamond Model can help guide your analysis. Data normalization involves transforming data from different sources and formats into a common format for comparison and processing. Data enrichment adds additional information or context to enhance its value and usefulness. Data correlation looks for relationships or patterns between data to identify anomalies, trends, or causation. Finally, data prioritization ranks data based on its importance, urgency, or impact.

4 Apply threat intelligence to patching

After analyzing threat intelligence data, it's important to apply it to your patching strategy and decisions. You can use threat intelligence to inform your patching by identifying the most critical and urgent patches, prioritizing them based on risk level and asset value, scheduling them based on availability and performance, testing them prior to deployment, and monitoring the patching process and outcomes. A patch management system or tool can be used to automate and streamline the workflow and tasks. Additionally, communication and coordination with stakeholders such as IT, security, business, and users is essential for alignment and collaboration.

5 Review and improve your patching

Finally, you need to review and improve your patching based on the feedback and results of your threat intelligence and patching activities. This includes evaluating your patching goals and metrics against your baseline and expectations, identifying any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats in your patching process and performance, implementing any lessons learned, best practices, or recommendations to enhance your patching efficiency and effectiveness, updating your patching policies, procedures, and plans to reflect any changes or improvements, and continuing to collect, analyze, and apply threat intelligence to inform your patching. Furthermore, it's important to conduct regular and periodic reviews and audits of your patching to ensure compliance and quality. You should also use a continuous improvement cycle such as the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) to monitor and optimize your patching.