What Is Threat Intelligence? A Complete Guide

Benefits of threat intelligence

Cyber threat intelligence offers several key benefits to organizations, enabling a more robust and proactive cybersecurity posture.

• Shifting from reactive to proactive defense: Threat intelligence empowers organizations to anticipate and prevent attacks rather than merely reacting to incidents.
• Revealing adversary behavior: By understanding attackers' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), organizations gain insight into their decision-making processes, leading to better defense strategies.
• Empowering informed decision-making: Business leaders, such as CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs, can leverage threat intelligence to make more informed investment decisions, mitigate risks, and improve operational efficiency.
• Reducing costs: By enabling faster and more effective responses to attacks and potentially preventing breaches, threat intelligence programs can help reduce the significant costs associated with data breaches.
• Strengthening overall security posture: Threat intelligence contributes to a more robust cybersecurity posture and bolsters overall risk management and cybersecurity policies and responses.
• Improving detection and prevention: It provides information that can help detect attacks sooner and even completely stop some attacks from happening.
• Enhancing the effectiveness of security tools: Threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) can feed consolidated threat data to security tools like firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and SIEMs, enhancing their ability to detect and block malicious activity.
• Aiding incident response: Threat intelligence helps incident response teams intercept attacks and threat-hunting teams track down advanced persistent threats (APTs).
• Improving vulnerability management: Operational threat intelligence is vital for identifying critical vulnerabilities being actively exploited, enabling organizations to prioritize patching and preemptively address potential software weaknesses.
• Facilitating threat hunting: Threat intelligence, especially operational intelligence with its focus on TTPs, supports proactive cyber threat hunting activities.
• Providing context and insights: Threat intelligence offers context and insights about active attacks and potential threats to aid decision-making.
• Supporting fraud prevention: Integrating threat intelligence from various sources provides insights into the tactics and motivations of threat actors, aiding in preventing fraudulent uses of data or brand.
• Reducing third-party risk: Threat intelligence provides real-time insights into third-party threat environments, enhancing risk assessment and management as organizations expand data collection.
• Improving resource allocation: With knowledge of current threat campaigns, organizations can tune their defenses to maximize the potential of identifying and blocking future cyberattacks, ensuring limited cybersecurity resources are used effectively.
• Enabling knowledge sharing: It enables the sharing of knowledge, skills, and experiences among the cybersecurity community.

The threat intelligence lifecycle: A six-stage process

The threat intelligence lifecycle is a continuous process that transforms raw data into actionable intelligence, guiding security teams to make informed decisions. It consists of six critical stages, each building upon the previous one to ensure a robust and effective threat intelligence program.

1. Requirements

This initial stage is where the goals and methodology of the intelligence program are defined, aligning with stakeholder needs. Key activities include defining the objectives, understanding the attacker’s motivations, identifying the attack surface, and outlining actions to improve defenses.

Executive leaders (like the CISO), department heads, IT and security team members, and other stakeholders work with security analysts to set these intelligence requirements.

2. Collection

In this stage, raw threat data is gathered from various sources to meet the defined intelligence requirements and answer stakeholders’ questions. These sources can be internal, such as traffic logs and data from internal security solutions and threat detection systems.

External sources include public data, forums, social media, and subject matter experts. Organizations also commonly use threat intelligence feeds, which are streams of real-time threat information (though some may contain raw data, also called threat data feeds). Organizations may subscribe to multiple open-source and commercial feeds for different purposes, such as tracking IOCs, aggregating cybersecurity news, analyzing malware, and scraping social media and the dark web.

3. Pre-analytical Phase

This stage involves organizing and cleaning the raw data into a format suitable for analysis. Activities include aggregating, standardizing, and correlating the collected data. Applying frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK can help contextualize the data.

Filtering out false positives and grouping similar incidents are also key parts of processing. Many threat intelligence tools use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate this processing by correlating information from multiple sources and identifying initial trends.

4. Analysis

Security analysts extract the insights needed to meet the intelligence requirements and plan their next steps. This involves converting the processed information into actionable intelligence and adversary profiling.

For example, analysts might determine if a ransomware gang targeting other businesses in the same industry could pose a threat to their own organization. Effective analysis leads to an understanding of the "who," "why," and "how" behind attacks, including attacker motivations and TTPs.

5. Dissemination

In this phase, the security team shares its insights and recommendations with the appropriate stakeholders. The findings need to be presented in a digestible format, tailored to the audience (e.g., reports or slide decks for executives, technical details for security teams).

Action can then be taken based on these recommendations, such as establishing new SIEM detection rules or updating firewalls. Many threat intelligence tools integrate and share data with other security tools like SOARs and vulnerability management systems, enabling automated alerts, risk scoring, and response actions.

6. Feedback

This final stage involves gathering feedback from stakeholders to determine whether the requirements were met. Any new questions that arise or new intelligence gaps identified will inform the next round of the lifecycle, ensuring continuous improvement and refinement of the intelligence process. Priorities or reporting formats may also be adjusted based on feedback.

Types of Threat Intelligence

The diverse types of threat intelligence—tactical, operational, and strategic—collectively enhance an organization's overall cybersecurity posture against evolving threats by providing a multilayered and comprehensive understanding of the threat landscape.

Each type focuses on different aspects of threats and caters to different needs within an organization, creating a holistic defense when used together.

1. Tactical Threat Intelligence

Tactical threat intelligence focuses on immediate and short-term threats and is highly technical. It primarily deals with IOCs such as malicious IP addresses, URLs, file hashes, and domain names. This information helps security operations centers (SOCs) predict future attacks and better detect attacks in progress.

Tactical intelligence is often automated and machine-readable, allowing for integration into security tools like firewalls, IPS, and SIEM systems. Organizations can subscribe to tactical threat intelligence feeds to collect this information and feed it to their security solutions.

By identifying common IOCs, tactical intelligence enables incident response teams to intercept attacks and threat-hunting teams to track down APTs. It provides actionable threat intelligence that helps organizations adapt to changing attacker behaviors and threats.

2. Operational Threat Intelligence

Operational threat intelligence is broader and more technical than tactical intelligence. It focuses on understanding the TTPs employed by threat actors, including attack vectors, exploited vulnerabilities, and targeted assets. This type of intelligence requires human analysis to convert data into actionable insights and has a longer lifespan than tactical intelligence because adversaries cannot easily change their TTPs.

Information security decision-makers use operational threat intelligence to identify threat actors likely to target their organizations and determine effective security controls and mitigation strategies. It helps organizations understand the decision-making processes of threat actors, allowing for better defense strategies.

3. Strategic Threat Intelligence

Strategic threat intelligence offers a high-level perspective on the global threat landscape and how cyber threats intersect with global events, geopolitical conditions, and organizational risks. It is typically used by executive leadership (CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs) to understand the impact of cyber threats on the organization and guide cybersecurity investments that align with strategic priorities. It is also designed for nontechnical stakeholders like company boards.

Strategic intelligence informs business decisions and long-term cybersecurity strategies. It helps in aligning broader organizational risk management strategies and investments with the cyber threat landscape. It also provides long-term trend analysis and identification of significant risks that could lead to future attacks.

Trellix threat intelligence tools and services

Trellix seamlessly integrates threat intelligence into the Trellix Security Platform. We also provide a range of tools and services that deliver a comprehensive defense against potential cyberattacks and adversaries.

• Trellix Insights enables you to identify and prioritize threats, gain intelligence on a threat before an attack to predict impacts, and optimize your security stance with actionable content and analysis.
• Trellix Threat Intelligence Exchange combines internal and external threat data to enable you to contain threats in seconds with rapid detection and response.
• Trellix Intelligence as a Service provides a comprehensive threat intelligence analysis and threat intelligence specific to your needs.
• Trellix Global Threat Intelligence enables security products to act in concert, based on the same robust, real-time information.
• Trellix Private Global Threat Intelligence delivers private hosted onsite threat intelligence services to protect your organization’s highly sensitive, air-gapped environments.
• Trellix Advanced Threat Landscape Analysis System empowers you to better understand threats using its unique global insights into malicious behaviors.

In addition, the Trellix Advanced Research Center brings together an elite team of security professionals and researchers to produce insightful and actionable real-time intelligence to advance outcomes at your organization and the industry at large.

Trellix Threat Intelligence ensures that your organization is not only reacting to immediate threats but also understanding the underlying reasons and methodologies behind attacks. It empowers you to proactively plan your long-term defense strategies in response to the evolving cyber threat landscape.