In the era of data-driven decision making, the value of threat intelligence and interest in establishing or expanding threat intelligence programs is growing rapidly. However, the growing availability and access to data is outpacing the ability of these threat intelligence programs to leverage and operationalize it.

According to a recent Gartner report, “the value of (threat intelligence) services is sometimes constrained by the customer’s ability to afford, absorb, contextualize, and, especially, use the information provided by the services.” ¹

Many organizations use threat intelligence from industry peers to prioritize vulnerability management and assign criticality when there is not enough existing information directly about their organization or their organization’s critical assets. While this is a natural political response to frame the narrative to allow budgetary approval to build certain aspects of the security program, organizations need to defend specific to their own technology stack and assets, incorporate the proper tooling around this stack, and be able to log events at scale. 

If a security program indicates that their industry peers are being targeted by a variety of different threats broken down by industry, the narrative around this argument will likely be a more persuasive argument for non-technical business executives approving budgets.

Threat intelligence feeds have become popular, and a company's ability to track threats outside of its own environment is better than ever. With these improvements though, has come an increasing demand on security professionals to select and manage the right combination of tools to achieve their desired outcomes.

Here is a brief look at the history of the cyber threat intelligence industry, and where we might go from here.

Argument -  fierce, bold, and impassioned - has been at the heart of our American democracy since the founding. British censorship (colonists could speak without prior restraint but then be charged with sedition or libel) compelled the drafters of the Bill of Rights to include freedom of speech as part of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. 

Heated disagreement and even misinformation are as rampant on today’s internet as they were in the taverns and meeting halls of the colonies. This speech is rightly protected. But because of the sacredness of this right, it is disinformation – deliberate attempts by foreign and domestic actors to spread falsehoods in order to achieve a political end – that concerns us here at Nisos and that we leverage our capabilities to fight.

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.