Threat intelligence enables organisations to fight back against looming cyber threats, it is the practice of collecting, processing and analysing data in the hope of understanding a threat actor's motives, targets and attack behaviours.
In our previous blogs we talked about what is threat intelligence, and why sharing threat intelligence between companies benefits everyone. In this blog, we look at actionable threat intelligence - i.e. diving into several other critical uses for threat intelligence.
Five key ways in which actionable threat intelligence can be leveraged:
With cyber attacks and data breaches becoming regular occurrences, the amount of pressure an employee who is responsible for Incident response is under can be immense. In Australia alone, ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) responded to over 1,200 cyber security incidents in 2024–25, an 11% increase on the previous year. In the event of a security incident the amount of data security personnel need to manually go through to identify the problem can be overwhelming, this is where threat intelligence can prove to be helpful. For example, threat intelligence can reduce false positives, help with prioritising incident alerts based on risk and provide comparison of data between internal and external sources.
Organisations that have security operation centres tend to deal with numerous network alerts and analysts can tend to suffer from ‘alert fatigue’, which can lead to them taking alerts lightly. Threat Intelligence provides SOC teams with assistance in this area, providing help with triaging alerts, gathering information on potential threats ahead of time, filtering out false positives and making overall incident analysis easier.
A typical approach to vulnerability management that organisations adopt is, they look to patch every single vulnerability identified. This is extremely time-consuming and can prove to be quite counterproductive as it isn’t a realistic goal to achieve, a better approach would be to deal with vulnerabilities based on risk. Threat Intelligence helps in this domain, by effectively combining internal vulnerability scans and the data produced with external data, while also providing context via intelligence on attacker techniques, tactics and procedures.
In Australia, ASD’s Essential Eight maturity model takes the same risk-based view, asking organisations to patch vulnerabilities in online services within 48 hours of release when they are assessed as critical by vendors or when working exploits exist.
A risk model is a mathematical representation of a system, commonly incorporating probability distributions. Risk modelling is utilised by organisations to help decide which areas need investing in. However the issue with risk models is that they suffer from non specific, non-quantified results that are hastily compiled, based on little information, based on unfounded assumptions, or are difficult to take action on.
Threat Intelligence can help organisations with effective risk analysis, by providing valuable context to assist with defining risk measurements more accurately. For example, Threat Intelligence can help provide answers to questions like; which threat actors are responsible for a type of attack, what type of industry do they target, how many similar attacks have occurred recently, which vulnerabilities do these attacks look to exploit and what kind of damage is likely to occur if the attack was successful. These are a few questions that Threat Intelligence can provide answers to, hence providing more context and accuracy to risk models created by organisations during risk analysis.
Detection and responding to threats that are already exploiting networks and systems is one avenue of protecting an organisation, however organisations need to also look out for fraudulent use of their data or brand. Threat Intelligence can help with this by providing knowledge on the motivations and methods of criminals especially when it is correlated to data appearing on threads.
For example an organisation may fall prey to; cyber criminals impersonating their brand in the hopes to attack unsuspecting customers via a phishing attack, threat intelligence can help provide real-time alerts on the latest phishing trends, which can enable an organisation to preemptively detect potential threats. Another example of fraudulent use of data or brand is when criminals post compromised data to the dark web, threat intelligence can help organisations monitor the dark web for any of their compromised data, so quick action can be taken.
Does your company currently have any form of shared threat intelligence in place? If yes, awesome! If not, our expert team can help audit your systems and processes and establish cyber threat intelligence mechanisms to secure your business.
Threat intelligence is actionable when it is relevant to your organisation, timely, accurate and specific enough to support a decision, such as blocking an indicator, prioritising a patch or briefing the board. NIST describes cyber threat intelligence as threat information that has been aggregated, analysed, interpreted or enriched to provide the context needed for decision-making. Raw data without that context is not yet intelligence.
Threat intelligence is commonly grouped into strategic, operational and tactical intelligence, with some frameworks adding technical intelligence as a fourth type. Strategic intelligence informs executives and boards about broad trends and risks. Operational intelligence describes specific campaigns and threat actors, while tactical and technical intelligence cover attacker tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and the indicators that security tools can use.
Indicators of compromise are technical artefacts, such as malicious IP addresses, domain names or file hashes, that suggest an attack is underway or that a compromise may already have occurred. NIST Special Publication 800-150 describes indicators in these terms. Security teams load IoCs into tools such as a SIEM, firewall or endpoint protection platform to detect and block known threats quickly.
Through the ASD Cyber Security Partnership Program. Australian businesses with an ABN can join as business partners to receive ASD’s ACSC alerts, advisories and a newsletter every two months. Eligible network partners can also receive timely, actionable cyber threat information, including indicators of compromise and machine-readable threat intelligence for automated detection.
Yes, although most small businesses don’t need an in-house threat intelligence team. A practical starting point is subscribing to ASD’s ACSC Alert Service, which provides information on current cyber threats. Working with a managed security provider whose security operations centre (SOC) already uses threat intelligence feeds gives you the benefit of that intelligence without building the capability yourself.
The two work together. Threat intelligence tells you which attackers, techniques and indicators are relevant to your organisation, and threat hunters use that knowledge to search proactively for signs of compromise that automated tools may have missed. Findings from each hunt then feed back into your intelligence and detection rules.