Why Good Cyber Threat Intelligence Matters: Practical Benefits You Can’t Afford to Ignore

When many people hear the word “intelligence,” they imagine classified secrets, covert operations, or military agencies.

But at its core, intelligence is much simpler, and far more practical.

Intelligence is the process of collecting, analysing, and delivering information to help decision-makers act more effectively.

In the defense and national security worlds, intelligence teams don’t just collect information for its own sake. They sift through noise, find patterns, and deliver clear assessments so leaders can:

• Prioritise threats
• Allocate resources
• Anticipate risks
• Make strategic decisions grounded in reality.

The same approach applies directly to cybersecurity.

In an organisation, cybersecurity leaders face many of the same challenges:

• Limited budgets
• Complex threat environments
• Pressure to defend critical assets against increasingly sophisticated attackers.

Good CTI provides the clarity needed to make those decisions well.

It turns an overwhelming flood of alerts, vulnerabilities, and headlines into focused, actionable insights.

It helps you prioritise where to defend, how to invest, and what real threats to anticipate, not based on fear or assumptions, but based on evidence.

Put simply:

Intelligence isn’t about secrets. It’s about enabling better decisions.

And today, any organisation, not just governments, can benefit from using intelligence to guide their cybersecurity strategy.

Threat-informed defence is simple in concept but powerful in execution:
you use real-world intelligence about how attackers operate to prioritise, harden, and detect threats more effectively.

With good CTI, you can:

• Focus defences on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) actually being used against your sector and region.
• Avoid wasting time and money defending against unlikely or irrelevant threats.
• Align your security program to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK®, making it evidence-based rather than assumption-driven.

Good CTI transforms your security program from reactive guesswork to proactive, data-driven defence.

Security budgets are rarely limitless.

With rising SIEM costs and growing infrastructure complexity, every dollar counts.

Good CTI enables you to:

• Prioritise limited security spend by investing in mitigations that counter the widest range of real-world TTPs, not theoretical threats.
• Identify gaps in critical detection capabilities that would otherwise leave you blind to key attack paths.
• Reduce unnecessary costs by showing you which log sources in your SIEM don’t meaningfully contribute to detection, helping you drop them and cut ingestion costs without increasing risk.

Without good CTI, many organisations end up over-investing in areas that don’t move the needle, while leaving themselves exposed elsewhere.

When a real incident happens, time is everything.

Teams that rely on actionable CTI can respond faster because they:

• Recognise the behaviours of attackers earlier in the kill chain.
• Validate and triage alerts more accurately based on known adversary patterns.
• Cut through noise to focus on the highest-risk activities.

Better intelligence = better detection = better outcomes.

Another key advantage is the power of open-source cyber threat intelligence.

Too often, organisations buy expensive CTI feeds that operate like black boxes.

You pay for the data, but you can’t interrogate the sources, validate the thoroughness, or assess the real quality. You’re left trusting that the vendor’s standards match your needs, without any real way to be sure.

Open-source CTI changes that.

When intelligence sources are open, you can:

• Verify the accuracy of the information yourself.
• Evaluate the breadth and depth of the collection.
• Prioritise based on what’s actually relevant to your threat model.
• Build trust in your intelligence processes because you know where it’s coming from and how it’s produced.

Arachne Digital believes this transparency is critical.

It ensures you’re not just getting “feeds”, you’re getting good CTI you can rely on to:

• Implement true threat-informed defence,
• Spend smarter,
• Detect faster,
• Avoid wasting resources on irrelevant or low-quality data.

Open-source CTI gives you the control you need to validate that your defences are grounded in reality, not marketing claims.

One of the most overlooked benefits of good cyber threat intelligence is the ability to move security conversations from guesswork to evidence-based reporting.

Security teams armed with strong CTI can clearly show executives:

• Which attacker behaviours are actually being used against their sector and geography,
• Which mitigations directly reduce exposure to those behaviours,
• How investments map to real-world risk reduction, not theoretical models.

Instead of presenting abstract risk matrices or generic compliance checklists, you can deliver defensible, board-level strategies grounded in facts:

• “Here are the top five TTPs targeting our industry.”
• “Here’s how we’re mitigating them.”
• “Here’s how our controls reduce the likelihood and impact of these attacks.”

This shifts security from being perceived as a cost centre to a strategic enabler of business resilience.

Good CTI lets you justify your budget, prioritise actions, and demonstrate clear return on security investments, all with the confidence that you’re basing decisions on how real-world adversaries actually operate, not assumptions.

To see how practical, actionable CTI makes a real difference, let’s apply the insights from a real-world report complied by Arachne Digital, covering the healthcare sector in North America between October 2024 and April 2025.

Top Techniques Identified:

The most common MITRE ATT&CK Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) identified targeting healthcare during this period included:

• T1005: Data from Local System
• T1105: Ingress Tool Transfer
• T1486: Data Encrypted for Impact (ransomware)
• T1190: Exploit Public-Facing Application
• T1059.001: Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell
• T1078: Valid Accounts (stolen credentials)

These TTPs align with major attack patterns like data theft, ransomware deployment, and credential abuse, the risks healthcare providers face most.

Prioritising Security Spend

Using this intelligence, a healthcare organisation could focus their limited budget on the mitigations most likely to prevent real attacks, such as:

• Deploying Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools (M1057) to prevent data theft (T1005).
• Hardening public-facing applications with Web Application Firewalls, vulnerability scanning, and patch management (M1050, M1016) to blunt exploit attempts (T1190).
• Implementing endpoint behaviour protection (M1040) against ransomware (T1486).
• Strengthening credential hygiene with multi-factor authentication (M1032) and strict account management (M1018) to stop account compromise (T1078).

Rather than buying a broad range of generic security tools, the organisation can target investments where they matter most, maximising impact for every dollar spent.

Optimising SIEM Log Sources

The TTPs map to key data sources critical for detecting these attacks:

• Command execution monitoring (DS0017) to catch PowerShell or suspicious scripts.
• File access and creation monitoring (DS0022) to detect ransomware file enumeration and encryption.
• Network traffic monitoring (DS0029) to detect suspicious ingress or malware downloads.
• Authentication monitoring (DS0028) to identify stolen credential abuse.

Log Sources to Prioritise:

• Endpoint process creation and PowerShell execution logs
• File system modification and access logs
• Network flow and connection logs
• Authentication logs (logon events, session creation)

You may want to consider the utility of any high volume log sources that aren’t contributing to any meaningful detections. Your organisation might have a business need for the logs. But if you do not, you could drop those log sources and save money on SIEM ingest costs.

By tuning their SIEM to focus on these critical areas, healthcare organisations can improve detection while also saving significant costs on SIEM ingestion fees by dropping irrelevant logs.

CTI is at an inflection point.

Costs for premium feeds and services have risen sharply, and many organisations are questioning if it’s worth the price.

Meanwhile, others are underutilising their CTI investments because they haven’t built clear processes around them.

The truth is: you don’t need expensive, generic feeds.

You need good, relevant, actionable CTI. intelligence that maps to how attackers actually operate against you, and that you can immediately apply to strengthen your defences, optimise your spend, and stay resilient.

It’s not about shiny tools or chasing sensational headlines, it’s about building real, evidence-backed defences that work.