Threat Intelligence —
know what you're up against.
The threat landscape evolves daily. SignalPoint tracks active adversary groups, emerging malware families, and exploitation campaigns — and applies that intelligence directly to your defenses. This page covers the six most impactful threat categories facing Tennessee Valley businesses today.
Ransomware
Ransomware remains the most financially devastating threat facing SMBs. Professional criminal enterprises operate with negotiators, support desks, data leak sites, and affiliate programs. Average ransom demand in 2025: $2.73M (Sophos). The double-extortion model — encrypt and exfiltrate — means paying does not prevent data publication.
- SignalPoint detects ransomware pre-execution via behavioral EDR
- Ransomware-specific hunting playbooks run monthly
- Response team available 24/7 for active encryption events
Phishing & Business Email Compromise
91% of breaches begin with a phishing email (Verizon DBIR 2025). BEC has become the highest-dollar cybercrime category globally — $2.9B in reported losses in 2024 (FBI IC3). Modern campaigns use adversary-in-the-middle proxies to harvest session tokens after MFA, bypassing authentication entirely.
- BEC-specific detection rules in managed EDR monitoring
- Phishing simulation programs targeting your highest-risk roles
- Email anomaly monitoring for forwarding rules and exfiltration
Insider Threats
The average cost of an insider threat incident reached $16.2M in 2025 (Ponemon). Critically, 55% are attributed to negligence rather than malice — employees who misconfigure, over-share, or fall for social engineering. Malicious insiders are harder: they already have authorized access and operate slowly to avoid tripping alerts.
- User and entity behavior analytics to detect anomalous access
- Privilege monitoring and least-privilege advisory
- Offboarding process verification to prevent orphaned access
Advanced Persistent Threats
APT actors operate with patience, resources, and objectives distinct from opportunistic criminal groups. They do not deploy ransomware on day one. They establish multiple persistence mechanisms, map your environment, and wait. Median dwell time before detection: 10 days (Mandiant 2025). Some intrusions are measured in months.
- Threat hunting targeting low-frequency, high-persistence indicators
- MITRE ATT&CK framework detection engineering
- Intelligence-driven hunt hypotheses updated with current APT TTPs
Supply Chain Attacks
Supply chain attacks compromise one trusted vendor to gain access to all organizations that trust them. A 633% increase in software supply chain attacks since 2021 (Sonatype). The SolarWinds, Kaseya, and 3CX compromises demonstrated that even security-conscious vendors are viable targets. Signed malicious updates bypass most defenses.
- Vendor access monitoring and segmentation review
- Behavioral monitoring for supply chain compromise IOCs
- Third-party access incident response scenarios
Living-off-the-Land (LOTL)
LOTL attacks use tools already installed on your systems — PowerShell, WMI, certutil, mshta — to execute attacks without dropping detectable malware. 75% of malware-free attacks use LOTL techniques (CrowdStrike 2025). Detection requires behavioral analysis because there are no malicious files to scan. Signature-based AV is completely blind to LOTL.
- PowerShell script block logging and behavioral baselines
- LOLBin-specific threat hunting playbooks
- Command-line argument analysis and process ancestry monitoring