How Cyber Threat Intelligence Fits Into Cyber Security

CTI is evidence-based knowledge, about adversaries, their tools, and their behaviours, that guides security decisions at speed.

Keep that definition close. It explains why CTI isn’t a luxury; it’s a control that informs every other control.

• Identify: Asset lists drift; risk registers stay generic. Intelligence reveals which industries, regions, and technologies attackers target, sharpening risk scoring.
• Protect: Control selection feels random. Threat-driven priorities steer hardening efforts toward high-value systems.
• Detect: Alert rules trigger on every hash copy-pasted from Reddit. Curated indicators and ATT&CK tactics cut false positives, highlight real campaigns.
• Respond: Analysts scramble to name the actor or likely next move. Profiles, TTP timelines, and course-of-action playbooks shape faster containment.
• Recover: Post-incident reports lack forward-looking guidance. Trend data predicts whether the actor will return and how to brace for it.

Notice a pattern. CTI doesn’t replace existing processes; it percolates through each one, aligning teams on a single view of risk.

Strategic intelligence

• Audience: Executives, boards, risk managers
• Use: Budget, policy, insurance
• Example: A yearly briefing shows cyber threat actor dwell time dropped 20% after EDR rollout, but supply-chain attacks rose 40%. Finance signs off on SBOM tooling instead of more firewalls.

Operational intelligence

• Audience: Security architects, SOC leads, incident responders
• Use: Control tuning, playbooks, tabletop scenarios
• Example: Intelligence shows a new loader that bypasses MFA with reverse-proxy kits. The SOC updates their detection rules and adds outbound proxy blocks before the loader reaches the fleet.

Tactical intelligence

• Audience: Front-line analysts, hunters, automated detection systems
• Use: Immediate blocklists, signatures, YARA rules
• Example: An indicator feed surfaces a SHA-256 hash tied to that loader. The EDR isolates three endpoints within seconds.

Tie the layers together and you create a tight feedback loop: strategic sets direction, operational turns it into projects, tactical handles the minute-to-minute battles.

Morning stand-up. The team reviews overnight intelligence:

• Arachne Digital’s feed flags a cluster of HTTP requests matching ATT&CK T1190: Exploit Public-Facing Application against Confluence servers.
• Your environment runs Confluence, so the SOC checks vulnerability status. One instance missed last week’s patch window.
• Patch team deploys immediately.
• Detection engineers craft a Sigma rule that looks for the exploit’s unique User-Agent header.
• A playbook update adds references to the Arachne report, giving responders context on the actor’s usual second-stage tools.

Those are concrete tasks triggered by one piece of CTI. None required extra headcount, just relevant insight at the right moment.

Our platform ingests raw reports, maps sentences to ATT&CK, and adds human vetting. The output feeds SIEMs, SOAR playbooks, and board dashboards. Vulnerabilities in edge devices happen, but imagine knowing ahead of time who was likely to target you, and already having mitigations and detections in place before the next zero day.

Below is how raw CTI from Arachne Digital is turned into real tasks the SOC can pick up now. The below information is taken from an Arachne Digital CTI report covering Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers across Oceania, looking at attacks from December 2024 to June 2025.

Read the Intelligence, Spot the Signal

Top attacker behaviours

• T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application
• T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer
• T1005 Data from Local System
• T1555.003 Credentials from Web Browsers
• T1059.001 PowerShell

Most-used tooling

• Lumma Stealer
• PsExec
• QakBot
• Cobalt Strike
• Rclone

Active Groups

• FIN7
• APT44
• Battery Elf
• Water Gamayun

This says attackers are getting in through edge apps, moving tools inside the network, and pulling data with commodity stealers.

Map Findings to the Security Program

• Identify: Edge apps with CVEs exploited under T1190. Compile a “patch-this-week” list for Confluence, Ivanti, SAP NetWeaver instances.
• Protect: Browser credential theft (T1555.003). Push hardening GPO, disable password storage, enforce WebAuthn keys, block third-party cookies.
• Detect: Tool transfer (T1105) & PowerShell abuse (T1059.001). Add Sigma rules for large outbound FTP/HTTP uploads and PowerShell script-block logging.
• Respond: Data exfil (T1005). Create a SOAR playbook, if large ZIP leaves the DMZ, auto-isolate host, open incident.
• Recover: Re-attack risk from FIN7. After-action review feeds lessons back into patch list; schedule purple-team test on top 5 TTPs.

Build the Sprint Backlog (Two-Week Example)

• Day 1: Deploy WAF rule set tuned to the 10 most exploited CVEs in the report.
• Day 2–3: Roll out PowerShell Constrained Language Mode to all admin workstations.
• Day 4–5: Update EDR with YARA for Lumma Stealer and QakBot samples from the feed.
• Day 6: Enable ASR rules blocking unsigned scripts; verify no business breakage.
• Day 7–8: Tune SIEM to flag anomalous FTP or HTTP PUT to external IPs.
• Day 9–10: Table-top drill covering FIN7 spearfish → PsExec lateral move → Rclone exfil.

Each ticket is traceable to a TTP in the intelligence, so budget conversations stay fact-based.

Measure What Matters

• MTTD (Mean-Time-to-Detect) for PowerShell abuse, target 15 min.
• Patch Lag on high-risk edge CVEs, target <7 days.
• False-Positive Rate on new T1105 rule, keep under 2%.

Capture these before and after the sprint; that’s your ROI story.

Automate the Feedback Loop

• Feed the ATT&CK-mapped JSON from Arachne Digital into your SIEM each night.
• Use ATT&CK Navigator to heat-map technique coverage; gaps become next month’s backlog.
• Push incident artifacts (hashes, scripts) back to the feed, tightens everyone’s intel.

If you can’t trace the evidence, you’re not holding intelligence, you’re holding blind faith.

Every datum above links back to a source you can inspect, so you act on knowledge, not hope. Reach out for a proof of concept to see for yourself.

Define collection requirements

List the business units, technologies, and geographies that matter. Good intelligence starts with questions, not feeds.

Pick sources you can vet

Open-source reports, commercial subscriptions, ISAC communities, verify each for accuracy and timeliness. One high-quality source beats ten stale ones. Again, when a feed won’t let you audit its sources, it’s not CTI, it’s a leap of faith.

Normalise to a common language

Frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and STIX let machines correlate tactics across datasets. Your SIEM, SOAR, and ticketing tools speak that same dictionary.

Automate low-value steps

Parsing JSON, deduplicating indicators, enriching with WHOIS. Scripts handle these so analysts focus on judgement calls.

Measure outcomes

Track mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-contain before and after CTI rollout. Hard numbers justify the budget next quarter.

Feed fatigue

Inbox floods with 50k IoCs daily; nobody reads them.

Filter by relevance: only actors targeting your sector, only TTPs seen in last 90 days. Older IoCs are still useful to understand historic patterns, but you need to know they are historic.

One-way information flow

Analysts consume intel but never share findings.

Push incident learnings back to the provider, if possible. You may have particular security requirements, but community sharing sharpens everyone’s data. A rising tide lifts all boats and altruism will pragmatically benefit you in the long run.

Over-reliance on IoCs

Blocklists grow, but adversaries shift IPs hourly.

Balance static IoCs with behaviour-based detections tied to ATT&CK tactics.

Lack of ownership

CTI tasks fall between SOC and risk teams.

Assign a single owner, a CTI analyst or security architect, to drive integration.

Audit your last major incident. List every question you asked while responding. Which ones would CTI have answered faster?

Align CTI to a business goal. Maybe you need to cut phishing losses by 30% or pass an upcoming audit. Tie intelligence tasks to that goal.

Start small. Subscribe to one vetted feed, map findings to ATT&CK, and automate ingestion into your SIEM. Expand only when you see measurable gains.

Security programs succeed when every control pulls in the same direction. CTI provides the compass. Use it, and the next time an alert pops at 2 a.m., your team won’t guess, they’ll know.