From outdated legacy intelligence frameworks to modern-day technologically advanced automated intelligence, cyber threat intelligence has come a long way. Despite benefits, these technological advances have enabled threat actors to increase the complexity and range of cyberattacks.
According to the IBM X-Force 2025 Threat Intelligence Index, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024. Although recent estimates suggest a slight dip to $4.44 million in 2025, it doesn’t discount the fact that threats are escalating at an unprecedented rate. The same report indicated that in 2024, attackers used valid accounts (i.e., compromised credentials) in 30% of total intrusions and an 84% increase year-over-year in phishing emails delivering infostealer malware.
These figures demonstrate the critical requirement of utilizing cutting-edge cyber threat intelligence tools focused on minimizing threat risk through proactive threat identification, vulnerability prioritisation, and patch strategy, and adopting informed controls.
What is Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI)?
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is the process of collecting, analyzing, and applying large-scale threat history data to gain a comprehensive context of cyber threats, adversaries, and attack methods. CTI aims to strengthen an organization’s data security posture, helping anticipate, detect, and respond to evolving risks
A robust CTI tool enables organizations to address who could attack us, why they would go after us, how they function, how we can prevent or minimize the impact, etc. Essentially, a CTI is a proactive intelligence framework that foresees emerging risks that could disrupt business operations and cause significant monetary and reputational damage, provides the ability to prioritize risks, and adopt adequate security measures to avoid regulatory noncompliance.
Types of Cyber Threat Intelligence
There are four types of CTI. Each has a specific function and target audience within an organization. These include:
A. Strategic Threat Intelligence
The aim of Strategic Threat Intelligence (STI) is to provide a broad, high-level understanding of the general cybersecurity landscape, trends, and their potential impact on an organization. It assesses long-term risk patterns, economic and geopolitical factors, and emerging threats that could jeopardize an organization’s viability.
STI enables executives and decision-makers to understand possible cyberthreats by providing insights into the goals, capabilities, and motivations of threat actors. This enables organizations to develop risk mitigation plans that minimize the impact of such threats.
B. Tactical Threat Intelligence
Tactical Threat Intelligence (TTI) aims to address threat actors’ illicit tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to understand how a rogue intruder might target an organization. It also provides comprehensive insights into an attacker’s daily workings and progress towards attacking the organization, enabling organizations to dedicate resources where most necessary.
TTI provides in-depth analysis of threats across networks and systems, making it more complex than STI. Because of its granular insights, IT and Security Operations Center (SOC) teams leverage it to strengthen cybersecurity measures and improve incident response plans.
C. Operational Threat Intelligence
Operational Threat Intelligence (OTI) offers an incident-specific, targeted approach to analyzing threats in real-time, enabling incident response and threat mitigation teams to investigate and address threats.
D. Technical Threat Intelligence
Technical Threat Intelligence (TTI) analyzes the technical details of a threat. It gains a wide range of actionable data that enables teams to respond effectively, especially in time-critical situations. Information collected typically includes IP addresses, malware, grey domains, and sketchy URLs etc.
Why is Cyber Threat Intelligence Important?
A robust CTI framework ensures organizations adopt a proactive posture rather than a reactive one. At its core, CTI is important as it enables organizations to:
A. Forecast Attacks & Adopt Preemptive Measures
Cyberattacks are imminent and will only increase further. CTI acts as a predictive model that analyzes threat patterns to provide early warnings about upcoming threats and attacks. This enables organizations to assess upcoming vulnerabilities in real-time and adopt necessary security measures to prevent data breaches and inadvertent data exposure, resulting in a robust security posture that’s resilient and always prepared.
B. Ensures Timely Incident Response & Risk Management
CTI provides contextual intelligence that’s crucial in understanding where an attack is coming from, what is being targeted, what type of attack is incoming, and its intensity. This enables teams to be prepared and respond adequately. Additionally, CTI ensures alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements, where organizations can assign risk scores to vulnerable areas and dedicate risk management efforts accordingly.
C. Improved Decision-Making & Cross-Team Collaboration
CTI enables high-level teams to strategize and make informed security investments and policy updates that ensure regulatory compliance. It also improves information sharing and collaboration among teams that otherwise operate in silos to share valuable threat information and collectively defend against complex and global cyber threats.
Cyber Threat Intelligence Lifecycle
The CTI lifecycle is a structured technique that streamlines the process of converting raw threat data into actionable data security intelligence. It aims to continuously improve data threat quality and relevance to preemptively inform about incoming threats. It has a six-stage phase-wise approach that ensures threat intelligence aligns with the organization’s goals.
A. Discovery and Direction
The initial stage sets a comprehensive roadmap of the threat lifecycle by defining what constitutes a threat, what needs to be protected, etc. These intelligence requirements form the basis of intelligence efforts and ensure data remains protected at all times.
B. Collection
This stage involves the collection of raw data from multiple data points. These could include internal and external data touchpoints, including internal logs and threat feeds, among others. The aim is to obtain comprehensive insights into potential threat vectors that could jeopardize security.
C. Processing
This crucial phase filters raw data and formats it in a structured manner. Information that’s not relevant is removed, and any inconsistencies are corrected, giving teams contextual data intelligence.
D. Analysis
An analysis is conducted of the processed data to examine any similarities and patterns that indicate a threat pattern. This phase sets the tone for decision-making.
E. Dissemination
Based on the analysis, a threat intelligence report is formed, which is then shared with key stakeholders in charge of upholding security and decision-making. This step is crucial as it invokes oversight bodies to make informed decisions about disclosed threats.
F. Feedback
No system is reliable if it doesn’t welcome any feedback. This last phase assesses the accuracy and reliability of the intelligence shared with core team members. It accepts the evaluation of the entire threat discovery activity and threat quality.
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Securiti’s Data Security Posture Management provides holistic insight into the security posture of your multicloud, SaaS, on-prem, data lakes and warehouses and data streaming environments.
With Securiti, organizations can swiftly discover data assets, classify data, detect risk, and automatically remediate misconfigurations, gain insights through proactive intelligence and adopt controls safely, ensuring that sensitive data stays protected.
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