Actionable cyber threat intelligence should inform a security operations center’s prioritization of the most critical applications and infrastructure to the business and threat hunt program in ways a security stack cannot. With hypotheses-led, defined use cases that focus on signatures and more importantly behavior, threat hunting programs can operationalize threat intelligence by mapping threats to data sources and decision matrices that provide alerts and subsequent action. As a deliverable, a SOC can then count the actionable alerts versus the total alerts and, if captured appropriately, a security program can scale by reducing time to respond with fewer resources.

Deriving actionable intelligence to enhance organizational security is a challenge faced by all global companies and often further complicated by intertwined networks resulting from mergers and acquisitions. With the volumes of data, it’s important to shape a threat hunting program to be able to consume and operationalize data collected from various sources.