What are Threat Intelligence Feeds?

These feeds include actionable threat intelligence derived from various sources, such as commercial feeds, public sources, and honeypot networks. Threat intelligence feeds enable organizations to stay informed about potential threats by providing real-time insights into malicious activity. This information helps organizations strengthen their cybersecurity defenses by understanding attack patterns, identifying suspicious domains, and mitigating incoming attacks.

Threat intelligence is crucial because the cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving. Security teams need real-time data to detect real threats and respond effectively to observed activity. With this knowledge, they can build a stronger security posture and make more informed decisions.

What are Threat Intelligence Feeds?

Threat intel feeds are continuous streams of observed activity, including malware hashes, malicious domains, and threat indicators. They provide organizations with valuable insights into the cyber threat landscape, enabling them to identify and respond to real threats proactively.

For example, threat intelligence sources may include data on potential threat types such as persistent threats, zero-day exploits, or anomalous behaviors like suspicious network activity. These feeds are a critical component of any robust security strategy, as they provide real-time data to analyze malicious IP addresses and other indicators of potential attacks.

Provide information on cybersecurity threats and trends in real-time, enabling organizations to defend against attacks proactively. Security teams can also use this information to better understand potential hackers’ tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) and improve their security posture accordingly.

A multitude of open-source threat intelligence feeds exist, including the following:

• Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency’s Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS)
• The FBI’s InfraGard
• SANS Internet Storm Center
• Google Safe Browsing

Organizations rely on intelligence sources to gain visibility into attack tactics and prevent malicious activity before it escalates into major security incidents.

How Do Threat Intelligence Feeds Collect Data?

Each threat intelligence feed may collect data from several sources. Potential sources include the following:

• Open-source data that is collected by and shared among cybersecurity professionals
• Customer telemetry information from security companies that aggregate this information across multiple organizations/users
• Crawling the internet to search for exploits and attacks
• An understanding of malware properties gained by running identified malware in a safe sandbox

This proactive approach ensures organizations can monitor the cyber threat landscape and make informed decisions about mitigating real threats. The data collected from these sources is invaluable for incident response teams, who rely on this real-time information to detect, assess, and neutralize threats quickly. 

By leveraging insights from malware properties, telemetry, and suspicious domains, these teams can streamline their efforts and mitigate risks effectively. By analyzing data from a wide range of intelligence sources, security teams can better understand the nature of incoming attacks and prepare for them.

What Are The Types of Threat Intelligence in Cyber Security?

Cyber threat intelligence comes in the following three basic categories:

1. Strategic Threat Intelligence

This type of threat intelligence offers high-level analysis for less technical audiences. It may include information about business impacts and how the threat fits into broader trends in the threat landscape. Strategic threat intelligence also plays a pivotal role in guiding strategic decisions within an organization. 

By offering insights into long-term trends and their potential impact, this intelligence empowers leadership to prioritize cybersecurity investments and align them with overarching business goals. Most strategic threat intelligence comes from open sources, such as local and national media or white papers and reports.

2. Tactical Threat Intelligence

This type focuses on IoCs to enable immediate threat identification and elimination. Often considered the most basic form of threat intelligence, tactical threat intelligence is more easily generated and often automated.

3. Operational Threat Intelligence

Operational threat intelligence comes from examining the details of past known attacks. By understanding the details of “who?”, “what?”, and “how?”, security teams gain insight into the motives and sophistication of threat actors.

Security teams must develop a way to best use the feeds. For example, depending on the particular feed, the data may be raw, contain a mix of relevant and irrelevant details, and may not include a clear indication of what to do with the threat information to avoid or mitigate an attack. To handle this, security professionals may use the feeds to generate automatic alerts, or they may integrate these feeds with other security tools, leveraging built-in threat response capabilities and automation.

What Do Security Analysts Use Threat Intelligence Feeds For?

Security analysts rely on threat intelligence teams to use feeds for monitoring suspicious activity and managing security incidents. These feeds are also essential for incident responders, who need real-time data to prioritize incoming attacks and reduce response times. By integrating threat intel feeds into their systems, organizations can:

• Detect malicious domains or domain names associated with malware attacks.
• Analyze attack patterns to predict future threats.
• Use intelligence sources to enhance their response to threats.

With easy access to these threat intelligence feeds, security analysts can develop procedures and responses to cybersecurity attacks, protecting your organization and its invaluable resources.

Why is it Important For Security Analysts to Leverage Threat Intelligence?

Because the threat landscape is constantly changing and growing increasingly complex, security analysts need the real-time actionable intelligence that comes from a threat intelligence feed to stay one step ahead of bad actors. Basic security measures simply aren’t enough.

The ability to transform threat intelligence sources into actionable threat intelligence is vital for maintaining a stronger security posture. Automated systems enable organizations to act on real-time insights, focusing resources on mitigating real threats while improving their overall cybersecurity defenses.

Staying informed on the current state of cyber threats via threat intelligence also provides teams with timely and accurate data, reduces time spent collecting data, and allows for proactive threat mitigation.

Spend Less Time Collecting Data

Threat intelligence that is curated for your organization and delivered automatically saves your security team time. If the team must sift through data manually, not only does this eat into time better spent making decisions or responding to threats, but it’s easier for them to miss threats or discover them too late.

Automating the more tedious parts of threat intelligence and integrating threat intelligence with your existing security programs and solutions improves your team’s ability to identify and respond to threats with enriched insights. This frees up time, allows you to extend the lifespan of legacy solutions, and even helps maximize your ROI.

Proactively Mitigate and Address Security Threats

Threat intelligence feeds allow organizations to create metrics that quantify and rank threats, enabling them to prioritize the most significant potential vulnerabilities. Information from these feeds also helps security teams learn about potential hackers’ methods, allowing them to better protect against them.

Ultimately, this leads to better allocation of time and resources used for threat management, improved monitoring, threat identification, and incident response times, and the ability to address security threats proactively before they become a problem.

Timely and Accurate Data

Because threat intelligence feeds deliver threat data in real time, security teams will learn about potential issues as soon as they are discovered. This is key because slower threat responses lead to larger data breaches and significant recovery costs. When the threat data has been intelligently curated and managed, you can also rely on its accuracy. Security teams can correctly identify false positives, for example, and avoid the time and expense of unnecessary threat responses.

How Does Threat Information Become Threat Intelligence?

Threat information is the collection of data in its rawest form. It provides insights into the latest trends and tactics that malicious actors can use against your organization’s security. However, it lacks a layered approach with contextual insight, cyber attack attribution, or any human element or oversight. Threat information becomes threat intelligence once the data has been processed and analyzed to paint a fuller picture of a malicious actor’s motives and behavior. This data is more actionable and allows your organization to efficiently devote resources to specific and relevant problems.

Stay Up-to-Date With the Latest Threat Intelligence with SecurityScorecard’s Security Data

SecurityScorecard’s global security intelligence engine scans the internet to identify vulnerabilities, makes use of honeypots and sinkholes, and combines its findings with data from commercial and open-source threat feeds. Collecting millions of data points and using advanced machine learning made the industry’s most comprehensive and relevant security intelligence database possible.

SecurityScorecard’s Security Data provides an unparalleled breadth and depth of cybersecurity information that enables continuous monitoring of risk posture, scaling of risk management programs, and cost reduction.

SecurityScorecard’s Security Data product is a global security intelligence engine that leverages a number of threat intelligence feeds to provide the world’s most comprehensive source of cybersecurity data.