Summary of DORA and Its Connection to CTI

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), effective from January 17, 2025, establishes comprehensive guidelines to strengthen the digital resilience of financial entities across the European Union. It mandates robust measures for managing ICT risks, responding effectively to cyber incidents, and fostering the exchange of cyber threat intelligence.

DORA applies to a diverse range of financial organisations, including banks, investment firms, crypto-asset service providers, insurance companies, and ICT service providers. By emphasising integrated ICT risk management, incident response, and intelligence-sharing practices, the regulation aims to fortify these entities against the growing sophistication and frequency of cyber threats.

The role of CTI in DORA

DORA emphasises the integration of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) into security operations. Key mandates include:

• Continuous Risk Identification and Assessment: Financial entities must continuously identify ICT risks, evaluate vulnerabilities, and assess threats relevant to their business functions.
• Incident Learning and Resilience Testing: Organisations must learn from incidents, conduct post-incident reviews, and integrate findings into their risk management processes.
• Incident Management: Clear processes for detecting, triaging, managing, and reporting ICT incidents, supported by early warning systems and escalation procedures, are mandatory.
• Classification of Significant Incidents: Entities must prioritise incidents based on their severity, criticality, and potential impact on essential services.

How RST Cloud Simplifies DORA Compliance

RST Report Hub addresses the challenge of processing large volumes of unstructured data by collecting and analysing information from diverse sources, including blogs, reports, and articles with:

• Extracting key facts, objects, and their relationships, then delivering the data in a machine-readable format.
• Providing curated threat report feeds enriched with tags, annotations, and actionable insights, reducing analysts’ workload.

Additionally, RST Report Hub and RST Threat Feed focuses on extracting attacker Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) to provide detailed insights into the methods used by attackers. Mapping of TTPs to the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix, enabling organisations to prioritise mitigation strategies effectively.

Enhanced Incident Management with RST Cloud

RST Cloud solutions also align with DORA’s incident management requirements by:

• Enriching IoC Context: Includes various Threat Types and its attribution to a specific adversaries or APT, malware associations, and more.
• Providing Actionable Data: Includes Whois and ASN data, risk scores, current HTTP status and etc.
• Reducing False Positives: RST IoC Lookup and RST Noise Control help focus on critical threats through filtering known-good and getting comprehensive information on known-bad.

Benefits for financial institutions:

• Direct integration with SOCs, NGFWs, EDRs, and WAFs.
• Improved efficiency in phishing investigations, email security, and incident response.

Key Advantages of RST Cloud for DORA Compliance

By leveraging RST Cloud‘s cutting-edge solutions, financial institutions can efficiently meet DORA’s requirements, ensuring resilience against evolving cyber threats and maintaining regulatory compliance:

• Simplifies ICT risk management and incident response.
• Reduces analyst workload through automation.
• Delivers actionable intelligence for enhanced decision-making.

For more details, contact us.