Today, Intel 471, a global leader in cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and intelligence-driven solutions, released its new report, NIS2 Operationalising Cyber Threat Intelligence for Critical Infrastructure Resiliency.The report offers key insights into how actionable CTI can help organisations navigate Europe’s new cybersecurity regulations, proactively mitigate digital risk, improve cyber resilience, and avoid penalties and fines.
National laws implementing the European Union’s NIS2 Directive (EU) 2022/2555 to lift the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure across Europe went into effect on 18 October 2024. NIS2 has dramatic implications for how important and essential operators of critical services manage cyber risks compared to its predecessor, NIS1, the 2016 Network and Information Systems Directive. It gives regulators wider supervisory powers, introduces higher standards for cyber risk management, mandatory incident reporting and tougher sanctions. If not followed, essential entities face administrative fines of up to €10 million, or 2% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher. This directive is a major shift in cyber risk management and supply chain security for entities operating energy, transport, banking, health, water, digital infrastructure, managed IT services, public administration and many more subsectors.
In this report, Intel 471 outlines how these entities in critical sectors affected by the European Commission’s NIS2 Directive can leverage premier CTI and intelligence-driven threat hunting to proactively mitigate digital threats and meet the directive’s higher risk management and incident reporting requirements. The report provides organizations with best practices to reduce cyber risk, anticipate threats, prioritise remediation of cloud resources and other IT assets, and continuously improve risk management measures to boost resilience and recovery.
“It is the right time to adopt NIS2 given today’s high stakes cybersecurity threat landscape. We’re seeing nation-state and cybercrime activity increasingly overlap, often driven by geopolitical events that create higher risks to all critical sectors in Europe. Defenders are overwhelmed by data and need timely intelligence that helps them focus on emerging threats, adversary tactics, and vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to them,” says Michael DeBolt, Chief Intelligence Officer at Intel 471. “Our unmatched human intelligence capability, patented malware emulation and tracking insights, and human-validated automated collection across thousands of threat actor communities help our customers in critical sectors across the globe understand their exposure and proactively mitigate digital risks. We go a step further by providing carefully curated intelligence-driven threat hunting content to rapidly identify and stop advanced threats in their tracks.”
Organisations impacted by NIS2 can utilise Intel 471’s unique CTI capabilities to improve security posture, reduce their attack surface and enhance resilience. “Being prepared with timely and trusted intelligence and threat hunting content that identifies adversarial techniques missed by traditional detection methods is critical for organisations to gain early visibility of emerging threats and proactively respond to cyber incidents. This intelligence-led approach to cyber defense and third party risk is at the heart of NIS2 directive,” says DeBolt.
NIS2’s broader scope than NIS1 dictates that many affected entities are urgently working to mature their CTI programs to better support their NIS2 cyber risk management strategies. The CTI Capability Maturity Model (CTI-CMM) — a free and vendor-neutral, “stakeholder-first” model, sponsored by Intel 471 and 27 other CTI industry expert peers from across the globe, assists organisations in building successful, impactful CTI programs.
