Partner content When a new security advisory drops or an alarming new ransomware campaign makes the news, the question from leadership inevitably follows: “Are we covered?”
For many security teams, answering that question can be a slow and reactive process. Mapping new threats to your current configuration, authoring tests, and validating detection typically involve manual processes, scattered consoles, and spreadsheets. Days can pass before you have any assurance about your defensive posture, potentially leaving your organization exposed.
New threats don’t wait for you to catch up
Threat actors exploit overlooked gaps as soon as they identify them. If your defenses can’t address new techniques or rapidly evolving campaigns, vulnerabilities can linger undetected.
As days and weeks pass, threat intelligence decays because adversaries adapt their techniques and behaviors. Its value to an organization depends on how quickly teams can use it.
Most organizations struggle to do that. While many have access to high-quality intel, they often lack the processes and tools to translate it into action quickly enough for it to be useful. By the time they adjust their defenses in response to new intel, attackers are already onto the next vulnerability.
Bridging the gap between intel and implementation
Let’s consider a common scenario for a SOC or IT team. The team receives a detailed threat report loaded with guidance on the relevant techniques or variations, typically mapped to a framework like MITRE ATT&CK. This may include examples of Process Injection (T1055.001) and Disable or Modify Tools (T1562.001).
Given the many permutations of attack vectors, understanding the level of exposure from simply reading or analyzing the document is a challenging ask. You need to ask questions including:
- Does your EDR tool have coverage for T1055.001?
- Is the behavior detection engine even turned on?
- Are exclusion lists accidentally creating blind spots?
- Has a misconfigured policy neutered a critical detection?
And maybe most importantly, how would you even know?
Mapping controls to frameworks for fast threat intel use
You can answer these questions by understanding how your current tools and their respective configurations map to a particular framework. Given the prevalence of MITRE ATT&CK, understanding how various settings in your tools provide coverage for its inclusive tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) is a worthwhile first step.
This process helps identify which techniques your existing security stack addresses and where potential gaps exist. Then, when new threat intelligence comes in, you can evaluate how the relevant TTPs stack up against your existing environment. For example, knowing already which EDR settings provide coverage for T1055.001 and enables you to evaluate whether they are turned on and optimally configured.
This evaluation is still a manual effort for most teams. The average security team uses more than 10 tools. Each has its own settings, features, and capabilities that must be parsed and mapped to respective TTPs.
This mapping exercise also empowers security teams to answer critical questions prior to launching into a testing engagement. You can determine whether existing policy groups and settings are optimized for relevant behaviors, which devices and users are consequently at most risk, and whether the configuration aligns with intended outcomes.
After mapping platform policies, you can prioritize validation efforts during subsequent testing phases. Security teams can focus on refining detection logic for gaps identified during mapping rather than expending resources on techniques already effectively mitigated by existing tooling.
This approach improves operational efficiency and strengthens protection. Integrating frameworks like MITRE into this workflow aligns intelligence, policy, and actionable defense strategies, reinforcing your overall security posture.
Removing the bottleneck of manual mapping
To stay ahead in cybersecurity, you need more than mere knowledge of emerging threats. You need the ability to action that intelligence, ensuring every advance in your security posture addresses the evolving threat landscape. The challenge has always been speed, visibility, and scale.
This mapping is traditionally manual, and you must redo it as the security landscape evolves. At Prelude, we focus on automating that effort across leading security. We provide continuous exposure management by mapping the leading security tools’ policies and settings to MITRE ATT&CK and other frameworks. Automatically mapping tools to threat intelligence reduces the time between receiving a new piece of intel and reducing your current exposure.
Enabling a proactive security posture
By improving how you action threat intelligence, organizations can get ahead of the game. Instead of waiting for a threat actor to exploit a gap or relying on resource-intensive testing exercises, you’re equipped to validate and optimize your defenses continuously, in real time.
Mapping your existing tools and policies to MITRE bridges the gap between analysis and action, improves your response time, and makes the most of the tools you already have.
Joe Kaden is a technical account manager at Prelude Security. Previously, Joe support customer implementations and support for leading security brands in Symantec and SentinelOne. At Prelude, Joe focuses on helping organizations operationalize their security tools and streamlining their security practices.
Contributed by Prelude Security
