Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) helps security teams take a proactive approach to detect, mitigate, and prevent attacks. Evidence-based knowledge provides context, mechanisms, indicators, and action-oriented advice on existing and emerging threats. This knowledge includes understanding attack mechanisms, predicting future threats, and bolstering the organization’s defenses.
What Is Threat Intelligence?
Threat intelligence (TI) is the evidence-based process of collecting, analyzing, and applying knowledge about cyber threats. It helps security teams understand adversary behavior—like motives, targets, and methods—so they can detect, prioritize, and respond to threats more effectively.
Threat intelligence focuses on:
- The specific organization’s vulnerabilities.
- The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors.
- The indicators of compromise (IoCs) that may indicate an attack has occurred, is in progress, or may be imminent.
What It Does
- Transforms raw threat data into actionable insights
- Adds context and relevance to security events and alerts
- Enables proactive defense by anticipating attacker behavior
- Supports decision-making across security, IT, and executive teams
Who Uses It
- Threat intelligence analysts for alert triage, threat modeling, and reporting
- SOC teams and CSIRTs to detect, respond to, and mitigate threats
- IT and security engineers for patch prioritization and defense optimization
- Executives and risk managers to inform investments and assess exposure
Types of Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence has varying levels of complexity, representing a maturity curve in cyber threat intelligence catering to different organizations. The three main types include:
- Tactical threat intelligence: Security operations centers (SOCs) identify common IoCs to help incident response teams impede attacks and trace advanced persistent threats (APTs).
- Operational threat intelligence: Information security decision-makers focus on understanding the TTPs and behaviors of attackers to determine the security strategies that can successfully stop the attacks.
- Strategic threat intelligence: Decision-makers outside of IT, such as stakeholders, focus on cyber threats in a particular industry to align the broad executive risk management policies and investments with the cyber threat landscape.
| Type | Description | Typical Users |
| Tactical | IOC-focused, helps respond to immediate threats (IPs, hashes, domains) | SOCs, IR teams |
| Operational | Explains adversary behavior and methods (TTPs, campaigns) | IR leads, CTI teams |
| Strategic | High-level threat trends aligned to business/industry risks | CISOs, board-level execs |
Common Sources of Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence sources fall into four categories: open source intelligence (OSINT), commercial, internal, and community intelligence.
- OSINT: Publicly available data, including malware analysis reports, blogs, and advisories.
- Commercial: Intelligence from premium security vendors.
- Internal intelligence: The organization’s own threat intelligence, such as SIEM logs, network traffic, and incident reports.
- Community feeds: Sector-specific threat feeds for various industries.
Threat Intelligence Use Cases
- Alert triage: Focus on real threats, not noise
- Incident response: Provide attacker context and known behavior
- Threat hunting: Discover hidden or novel attacker behavior
- Vulnerability prioritization: Patch what’s exploited, not just what’s known
- Strategic reporting: Communicate threat trends in business terms
The Threat Intelligence Lifecycle
The threat intelligence life cycle is a continuous feedback loop that involves six key steps outlined in the NIST Special Publication 800-150. These steps are the government standard for cyber threat information sharing.
Defined by NIST 800-150, this lifecycle ensures intelligence is purposeful and reusable:
- Planning: Set requirements based on risk and mission
- Collection: Gather relevant raw data
- Processing: Clean, normalize, and enrich data
- Analysis: Turn data into decision-ready insights
- Dissemination: Share intelligence across roles and tools
- Feedback: Evaluate usefulness and update the process
The Benefits of Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence keeps organizations one step ahead of attackers by offering insight into the TTPs to help them anticipate and preempt potential cyberattacks. Threat intelligence provides many advantages:
- Uncovers hidden threats: Threat intelligence illuminates the unknown, enabling security teams to make informed decisions and prepare for potential attacks.
- Reveals attackers’ behavior: Understanding the TTPs of attackers gives security professionals insight that can help create better defense systems.
- Empowers smart decisions: Business leaders can leverage threat intelligence to make beneficial investment decisions, mitigate risks, and maintain operational efficiency.
- Enables proactive defense: With threat intelligence, cybersecurity teams graduate from reacting to incidents to anticipating and preventing them before they occur.
Threat intelligence can minimize the required skill set for incident handling, reduce costs, and enhance the effectiveness of security analysts.
Why It Matters
- Helps prevent breaches by illuminating attacker behavior
- Reduces time to respond and improves accuracy
- Bridges gaps between data, tools, and teams
- Enables cyber risk communication in business terms
“With ThreatConnect, we reduced our alert triage time by 50% and improved collaboration across SOC and CTI teams.”
Maintain Security With Our Threat Intelligence Operations (TI Ops) Platform
As cyber threats become more intricate, having a sophisticated threat intelligence tool is essential. ThreatConnect’s Threat Intelligence Platform helps cybersecurity teams proactively monitor, identify and mitigate security threats to protect their company’s data and assets.