Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is often talked about in broad, abstract terms.
But when budgets are tight and cyber risk keeps rising, security leaders need to know: what can you actually achieve with good CTI?
Arachne Digital believes CTI should be clear, concrete, and drive measurable outcomes. Done right, CTI isn’t just a “nice to have”. It’s one of the smartest investments an organisation can make.
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:
The same approach applies directly to cybersecurity.
In an organisation, cybersecurity leaders face many of the same challenges:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Instead of presenting abstract risk matrices or generic compliance checklists, you can deliver defensible, board-level strategies grounded in facts:
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:
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:
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:
Log Sources to Prioritise:
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.
“Arachne Digital’s team works closely with us in integrating our tool, Speculo, with their data. Speculo is designed to help organisations get a full picture of their cyber risk with reliable analytics and a streamlined risk assessment process. The integration of Arachne Digital’s threat intelligence into Speculo provides evidence-based insights into cyber risks, making the tool more relevant to our customers. Arachne facilitated multiple face-to-face meetings and video calls, provided technical resources, comprehensive documentation, and example reports. This collaboration ensured that we could seamlessly integrate and utilize their data, significantly enriching the value we deliver to our clients.
Arachne Digital’s commitment to excellence and their proactive approach in supporting our needs have made them an indispensable partner. We highly recommend their services to any organisation looking to strengthen their threat intelligence capabilities.”
Arachne Digital is proud to partner with the DISARM Foundation as the inaugural member of their Partner Programme, launched at the beginning of 2024.
This partnership is crucial in supporting the DISARM Foundation’s mission to maintain and enhance the DISARM Framework, ensuring it remains a free and continuously updated resource in the fight against disinformation.
Through our collaboration, Arachne Digital provides valuable feedback, promotes the integration of the framework into our operations, and encourages wider adoption within the defender community. This partnership highlights our commitment to combating evolving threats and fostering a secure digital environment.