Threat intelligence is the cornerstone of a mature cybersecurity plan. Staying abreast of the emerging threats and knowing where and when your adversaries are about to strike is a crucial aspect in building organizational cyber defenses. It is so essential in fact that it can be seen as the one pillar that can make or break a company’s cybersecurity practices.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what threat intelligence is, what makes it so important, and the benefits that companies can get by leveraging it today.

First Off: What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence is all about gathering, processing, and analyzing evidence-based knowledge to make informed decisions regarding the potential cybersecurity threats to an organization. This can include studying the target’s infrastructure, capabilities, motives, objectives, and resources. It lets users recognize their adversaries in context—allowing them to protect themselves better.

Threat intelligence is often integrated with existing solutions and workflows to minimize the additional workload of specialists. One such example is Threat Intelligence Platform, which is an enterprise-level suite that combines a range of services and APIs for automated in-depth security analysis.

If you’re interested in understanding how you can put threat intelligence into practice with these types of tools, you can read our article How to Be Intelligent about Threat Intelligence.

Us and Them: What Makes Threat Intelligence Important?

You probably know by now that threat actors are always looking for new ways to gain unauthorized access to networks and benefit from unpatched vulnerabilities. Moreover, cyber attacks can take so many forms that businesses simply don’t have enough time and resources to examine all of them and defend against every possible scenario.

With threat intelligence, companies can automatically gather information about external threats as well as analyze their own networks and look for the gaps that can be exploited by hackers, such as invalid SSL certificate chains, revoked protocols, open ports, and more. This enables efficient and targeted resource allocation to protect against specific risks. In other words, threat intelligence lets you reinforce defenses wisely to secure areas where attacks have the highest chance of taking place.

Threat Intelligence in Action: Exploring the Benefits

Detecting threats is often like searching for that one needle in a haystack. And having to sort out all of the alerts, false positives, and ever-increasing sophistication from cybercriminals only means more complexity moving forward.

Reliable threat intelligence tools such as Threat Intelligence Platform and their ability to provide not just warnings and red flags but also practical recommendations allows accelerating the threat detection process and the incident response capabilities of an organization.

Moreover, obtaining cyber threat intelligence means having real-time access to data on threats. Feeds and alerts can provide companies with a bigger picture of active concerns and ongoing incidents that enables cybersecurity teams to act quickly. In fact, there are other advantages in having live access to threat intelligence, which include:

• Gaining immediate insight into the threats faced by the organization together with their associated risks;
• Having relevant data needed to make decisions on which vulnerabilities need to be addressed first and the best way to tackle them;
• Possibility to keep track of ongoing cybercriminal activities that are specific to an industry;
• Being able to monitor networks to prevent threat actions actively.

* * *

Companies are finally coming to understand the benefits of threat intelligence as they start investing in specialized software in order to break down big data from numerous sources. Utilizing such tools as Threat Intelligence Platform that can convert threat data into actionable threat intelligence is a great way to navigate information overload, retrieve and analyze relevant details on adversaries, and therefore protect your company better.