ThreatIntelligence

Threat intelligence is knowledge about threats, threat actors, and risk to an organization, gathered, analyzed, and shared to inform security decisions and actions. It emphasizes context and relevance, turning raw data into actionable insights rather than simply collecting information. Intelligence is commonly stratified into strategic, operational, and tactical levels: strategic intelligence guides executives with high-level trends; operational intelligence signals imminent campaigns or campaigns in the wild; tactical intelligence provides actionable indicators such as IOCs and attacker TTPs.

Sources include open and vendor threat feeds, incident and vulnerability reports, malware analyses, and observations from the dark web or trusted partners. The intelligence process typically follows collection, processing and analysis, production, and dissemination, with feedback to improve quality. Analysts map findings to risk, threat models, or kill chains and align them with defensive priorities, incident response, threat hunting, and security architecture. Outputs may be briefings, threat reports, actor profiles, IOCs, and warning notes.

Standards such as STIX and TAXII support sharing and interoperability, while privacy and legal considerations govern data handling. Challenges include data volume and quality, attribution uncertainty, false positives, and ensuring timely delivery to decision makers. When integrated with security operations, threat intelligence enhances detection, prioritization, and proactive defense.