What Is Threat Intelligence

Conceptually, threat intelligence in cybersecurity refers to knowledge and information regarding potential threats to which an organization's security posture may be vulnerable. Threat intelligence is based on the collection, processing, and analysis of threat data in order to get actionable summaries (TTPs, IoCs, malicious actors’ motivations, goals, etc.) needed for decision-making. 

Security analysts and teams collect, analyze, interpret, and classify data from various threat intelligence sources to thoroughly investigate threats and understand the tactics, techniques, and procedures that threat actors may employ.

The value of threat intelligence is that it significantly reduces the risks and impact of cyber attacks, enabling organizations to benefit from more effective threat detection and coordinated response/countermeasures against attack vectors.

Threat intelligence enables a proactive approach to cybersecurity. This way, businesses can take advantage of informed strategic decisions, improved vulnerability prioritization, and automated defenses against both external and internal threats.

The Importance of Threat Intelligence

With emerging threats and an ever-expanding threat landscape, malicious actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated at exploiting cybersecurity gaps to target businesses. This requires organizations to improve their threat intelligence capabilities to protect critical infrastructure and assets.

By understanding threat features and potential risks, companies can more effectively identify patterns, prioritize risks, and implement robust security measures and incident response plans. The value of cyber threat intelligence within vulnerability management is that this methodology helps security teams know where to look, closing the door to threat actors. So, product and SecDevOps teams get the context for threat prioritization, understanding where attackers might strike.

Furthermore, threat intelligence integrations are essential for stakeholders and board-level/executives because this approach offers a broader perspective on the cybersecurity landscape and a clear risk summary (industry targeting, actor activity). This way, organizations can gain insights into the potential impact on the business, including costs and reputational damage.

Threat intelligence provides critical contextual information (such as tactics, procedures, techniques, industry-specific risks, etc). All this enables executives to make strategic decisions regarding risk management, investments, and resource allocation.

Prevent Cyberattacks & Implement Robust Defensive Measures. Leverage Jappware’s Expertise To Strengthen Your Security Posture Against Evolving Threats.  

Types of Threat Intelligence and How They Work

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Jappware Strategic / Focus on: High-level risks & trends for C-suite/ Valuable for: C-level executives and stakeholders Tactical / Focus on: Attackers’ TTPs (MITRE ATT&CK) / Valuable for: Incident response, blue teams, SOC analysts Operational / Focus on: Information on attackers’ campaigns, intentions (when/against whom), sources: security forums, chats, pastebin, telegram channels, etc. / Valuable for: Security operations managers, threat hunters Technical / Focus on: IoCs (IP/domain/URL/hash/certificate), short TTL / Valuable for: SOC teams, SIEM, EDR, WAF systems

There are four main types of threat intelligence, each with its own unique features in how it combats threats and attacks. Each also plays a complementary role in the overall protection and management of the risks your business may face.

The four threat intelligence categories include:​

  • Strategic Threat Intelligence. This provides a high-level view of the threat landscape, helping to understand how threats evolve over time. Strategic threat intelligence summarizes potential attacks and consequences and is extremely valuable to stakeholders and C-suite. The key focus of strategic threat intelligence is how threats can affect a specific organization/industry at a high level. The strategic approach is based on an analysis of emerging global trends and risks, which is then presented in a white paper or report.

  • Tactical Threat Intelligence. Tactical intelligence focuses on tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) needed to build a defense plan. This type of intelligence provides information on attacker methods and how best to mitigate them, offering security recommendations for the blue team/IR.

  • Technical Threat Intelligence. Technical intelligence also takes into account Indicators of Compromise (IoCs). These threat indicators include control-and-command (C&C) channels, IP addresses, domains, malicious emails, tools (malware and exploits), etc. The value of technical threat intelligence is that it helps security teams to protect networks and systems, preventing breaches. 

  • Operational Threat Intelligence. Operational intelligence considers security information from various internal and external sources, including malware analysis reports, phishing campaigns, social media, historical events, chat rooms, antivirus logs, and more. This approach to security enables the prediction of the timing and nature of future cyberattacks. This type of intelligence is focused on identifying and mitigating immediate threats facing an organization. This way, operational threat intelligence is valuable for incident response and security teams, helping them make necessary adjustments and reduce response times, providing valuable context for identifying immediate risks.

Threat Intelligence Lifecycle

Jappware cyrcle Requirements / Data Collection / Data Processing / Analysis / Distribution / Feedback

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The threat intelligence lifecycle is a framework that enables the transformation of raw security data into actionable insights. This helps organizations optimize resources and create incident response plans for both new and known threats. The lifecycle includes six main stages: requirements, data collection, data processing, analysis, distribution, and feedback. Let's take a closer look:

Requirements

This is about how the organization plans to use threat intelligence. A key step in the planning stage, defining requirements focuses on PIRs (Priority Intelligence Requirements) to support decision-making and achieve objectives. These include questions such as:

  • Who are the potential attackers?

  • What is the attack surface, and which areas are most vulnerable?

  • How can the organization mitigate and prevent threats, and what measures will help protect against future attacks?

Also, it’s essential to prioritize threats, ensuring the critical ones are addressed first. Requirements must be specific, actionable, and well-formulated to provide clear answers that enable understanding of the required actions. 

Data Collection

Once the requirements are defined, the security team begins collecting data based on the stated objectives. Information is collected through public data sources, traffic logs, forums, social platforms, and other available channels.

Data Processing

Raw data is not enough for action. The next step is processing the collected data. This includes breaking it down into suitable formats for analysis. The process typically comprises data arrangement, translation (from different formats/sources), decryption, and assessment of data relevance and credibility.

Analysis

Analysis takes into account concerns raised during the requirements step. At this stage, the security team deciphers the processed threat intelligence data into actionable items and recommendations.

Distribution

Distribution is the translation of analysis into readable formats for presentation to stakeholders. Most often, observations, conclusions, and recommendations are presented in concise, plain language to simplify the task and ensure stakeholders fully understand the information. Considering the purpose and audience, you can leverage standardized formats like STIX/TAXII or platforms (MISP and TIPs for technical teams). At the same time, operational stakeholders can receive security information through collaboration tools like Slack or Jira for immediate action.

Feedback

The final stage of the lifecycle is feedback, when the team incorporates stakeholder input and begins implementing a threat intelligence program based on the collected data, its analysis, and stakeholder decisions. At this stage, it’s worth using metrics such as coverage, true-positive rate, time-to-block, and IoC decay/expiry to measure the effectiveness of the effort and make improvements when needed. 

What is Threat Intelligence Integration?

Threat intelligence integrations involve combining data from various sources into a security information and event management (SIEM) system to effectively identify, assess, and respond to security threats and critical exposures.

The Importance of Integrating Threat Intelligence into Development and Product Planning

The key benefits of cyber threat intelligence integrations are that organizations can better secure their infrastructure and assets by gaining insights into the enemy's tactics.

Furthermore, such integrations and threat intelligence platforms are extremely valuable during the development and planning stages, helping strengthen both tactical defense and strategic decision-making, as the benefits of integration extend well beyond just threat intelligence feeds.

For enterprises, threat intelligence integrations are important because they offer:

  • Robust Security Measures. By understanding the specifics of potential threats, developers can build more secure systems from the start. For example, security teams can address specific attack vectors with MITRE ATT&CK techniques (considering an organization's threat landscape) or ASVS (Application Security Verification Standard) controls.

  • Proactive Threat Mitigation. An integrated threat intelligence platform with backlog item prioritization based on active-exploitation intelligence enables proactive threat mitigation rather than reactive incident response, following standard severity-based prioritization.

  • Reduced Development & Operational Risks. Threat intelligence allows for the identification and mitigation of risks during the development phase, significantly reducing the risk of security issues post-deployment.

  • Enhanced Situational Awareness. Threat intelligence provides real-time context on threat actor motivations and global threat trends relevant to the enterprise's sector. It’s a good idea to implement security headers and Content Security Policies (CSP). These defensive measures are based on recommendations considering recent attack campaigns targeting similar organizations, making them valuable for security teams.

  • Regulatory Compliance. Integrating threat intelligence into the planning and development stages enables the development of an intelligence-driven defense posture that takes into account data protection requirements and regulations.

Integrating Threat Intelligence in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

Let's look at how threat intelligence integrates into the secure software development lifecycle across its stages: planning, development, testing, and deployment.

Planning

We can highlight three main aspects worth focusing on: security objectives, potential threat identification, and resource allocation. It’s essential that your objectives align with the overall security strategy and address the project's specific risks, ensuring security is a priority throughout the development process. Also, identifying potential threats early (by considering historical data, industry trends, and threat intelligence reports) enables the design of systems that are resilient to specific attack vectors. Finally, it's essential to invest in threat intelligence platforms and staff training to ensure continuous monitoring and timely response to emerging threats, as well as to integrate threat data into the development lifecycle.

Development

During this stage, organizations can incorporate threat intelligence into coding practices to strengthen the application's security posture. Plus, it helps make code less susceptible to known exploits. This methodology also adheres to secure coding standards to minimize risks and avoid the use of deprecated functions. Additionally, threat modeling and risk assessment help identify potential threats and the ways attackers can exploit vulnerabilities, including their likelihood and impact.

Testing

Penetration testing is among the best ways to identify security weaknesses, as it simulates real-world attacks. Integrating threat intelligence enhances penetration testing by providing up-to-date information on the latest threats and attack techniques, and by helping uncover vulnerabilities. It also enables continuous vulnerability assessment and test case creation through a deeper understanding of the unique threat landscape an organization may face.

Deployment

During the deployment phase, integrating threat intelligence into continuous monitoring and logging enables real-time identification and response to threats. This also helps the team regularly update the application and release patches, keeping them informed about the latest threats. Finally, threat intelligence provides context about the threat, potential impact, and remediation steps, enabling the creation of effective incident response and remediation strategies.​

Threat intelligence has various use cases. For example:

  • Many existing security tools used by security operations centers and incident response teams are generic, lacking sufficient correlation between network data and threat understanding. They can also provide a dump of information due to thousands of threat indicators. Threat intelligence helps speed up incident response by enriching tips and alerts with threat intelligence data, addressing these issues.

  • Another problem is that detection tools may handle only limited amounts of data, requiring constant reprioritization of indicators. Threat intelligence integration provides proactive monitoring with playbook-driven automation (which contains filters and conditions that execute different branches depending on specific values).

  • Another example is when an organization lacks sufficient understanding of attack details and how it may be vulnerable. Here, threat modeling is effective in preventing or mitigating the impact of threats on the system. Threat intelligence enables the identification of techniques and tools used by threat actors and the sharing of this information with key stakeholders.

Best Practices for Effective Threat Intelligence Integration

Organizations can employ various threat intelligence practices. Let's look at them from the perspective of technical infrastructure and operational processes to make it more understandable:

Technical Infrastructure

It includes: 

  • Standardized Formats & Platforms. You can apply STIX/TAXII for structured threat data exchange or deploy MISP for collaborative threat sharing. Additionally, with Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs) teams can centralize and manage intelligence feeds.

  • Quality Control. Organizations can establish regular false-positive review cycles, implement confidence scoring for IoCs, and define TTL and decay policies to retire stale indicators. Meanwhile, maintaining whitelists helps prevent blocking legitimate assets.

  • Enrichment Pipeline. An efficient way to enhance decision-making is to build automated enrichment workflows that augment raw indicators with contextual data from WHOIS lookups, Passive DNS records, SSL certificate analysis, geolocation data, and sandbox detonation results.

Operational Processes

  • Continuous Monitoring. With continuous monitoring, organizations can take advantage of real-time threat detection by constantly scanning networks and systems for IoCs. 

  • Threat Hunting. Threat hunting programs help identify potential threats within the organization's environment before they cause damage. 

  • Automation via SOAR. Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) platforms streamlines threat response workflows. A typical automated workflow includes: 

block malicious IoC → notify security team → open incident ticket → verify impact → schedule automatic un-block based on IoC TTL

Collaboration and staff training are also worth considering. Participation in Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) or Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) helps you gain information on threats relevant to your industry. It's also worth establishing clear data-handling policies that account for intelligence feed licenses (TLP classifications) and define boundaries for sharing threat data across jurisdictions.

Finally, training teams help them stay informed about current threats and vulnerabilities and implement/follow new practices to address emerging threats.

Threat Intelligence Integration Challenges and Solutions

Threat intelligence challenges worth considering are:

  • Resource Limitations. Integrating threat intelligence and implementing changes/new tools requires resources. Organizations can use free, open-source solutions and feeds and scale efforts as needed.

  • Data Overload. Large volumes of multi-format data require robust analytics and automation tools to process and prioritize information. A solution may be implementing a SIEM system and an automation platform (SOAR) to process only critical data.

  • Source Reliability. Outdated or incorrect information leads to poor decision-making. Organizations should use commercial feeds and ISACs, regularly audit sources, and enable automated data validation across multiple independent sources.

  • Integration Complexity. Integrating threat intelligence into existing systems/tools requires planning and seamless collaboration. The solution is standardized data exchange formats (STIX/TAXII) and APIs to connect to the existing infrastructure.

  • Legal/Ethics & Licensing. Data collection and sharing may sometimes violate regulations such as GDPR or CCPA, and organizations may encounter challenges across jurisdictions when exchanging information internationally. Therefore, it's crucial to adhere to standards such as TLP. Additionally, organizations should find a balance between disclosing threat information and the potential harmful use of this data. Also, limitations on the use of commercial threat feeds and license incompatibilities when integrating with different sources can pose challenges.

  • Data Quality. When it comes to decision-making, data quality is critical. Organizations must consider aspects such as age, source trust, and overlap to ensure threat information is relevant, the source is credible and trustworthy, and that the data aligns with other sources.

  • Context Loss. Using bare IoCs without TTPs makes it challenging to assess a threat's relevance to an organization and can lead to incorrect prioritization, reducing the value of TI. IoCs must have clear context (who is attacking, how, what targets, what the threat level is, etc.).

  • Performance Impact During Over-Blocking. If you configure blocking too aggressively, it often leads to false positives, overloads IoCs, slows down networks and critical processes, and may block legitimate users. This can be addressed by properly prioritizing IoCs based on relevance and risk.

Integrating Threat Intelligence with Jappware’s Expertise

With Jappware, you can gain a comprehensive overview of your threat landscape. By developing custom solutions for organizations across industries such as finance, banking, healthcare, logistics, e-commerce, insurance, and legaltech, our team has the expertise and deep understanding of the unique threat landscape specific to your niche.

By starting projects and integrating threat intelligence into your existing systems with Jappware, you receive tailored solutions that address your objectives, needs, and industry specifics. Take advantage of our expertise to:​

  • Enhance your detection and response capabilities through security operations solutions to match real-time events and behaviors to attack patterns

  • Detect vulnerabilities within your environment with threat hunting

  • Expand incident response capabilities and ensure effective security controls through adversary TTPs

  • Identify and prioritize security gaps, accounting for tactics and techniques not fully covered by existing defenses

  • Design and assess security architectures through threat intelligence frameworks

  • Determine the scope of an intrusion and implement effective remediation plans

  • Get insights into tactics and procedures from clear threat reports

  • Conduct staff training and education through our guilds

  • Conduct risk assessments, develop security strategies, and monitor potential vulnerabilities

Summary

In addition to known vulnerabilities that are frequently exploited, malicious actors are constantly seeking new attack opportunities. As cyber threats emerge, securing infrastructure and assets is critical for organizations.

Threat intelligence provides an in-depth understanding of how hackers attack and of your organization's attack surface. Implementing threat intelligence strengthens your security posture by enabling early threat detection, robust incident response, and informed decision-making, ensuring proactive defense, expanded visibility, and preventing breaches.