How To Successfully Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Strategy

David Monnier is Chief Evangelist and Fellow at Team Cymru.

Global cyberattack attempts increased by 104% in 2023, yet 59% of security leaders say their teams are understaffed. It’s a combination that leaves teams overwhelmed and underprepared to protect their organization.

But there are ways to work smarter, not harder. For example, security teams are finding success by using external threat intelligence in their cybersecurity strategy to uncover vulnerabilities before their adversaries exploit them and shoring up defenses against attackers before they strike. According to Team Cymru's "Voice of a Threat Hunter Report 2024," nearly half of security practitioners surveyed experienced a severe security breach between mid-2023 to mid-2024—yet over 70% told us that their threat-hunting program took a major role in mitigating the breach. However, many security teams remain in a reactive state.

Steps To Maximize Your Threat Intelligence Benefits

As the chief evangelist at Team Cymru, I’ve spoken with hundreds of CISOs about their best practices for integrating and using external threat intelligence. With a few practical steps outlined below, you can maximize the benefits of your threat intelligence and add more value to your security team.

1. Identify your objectives.

Integrating threat intelligence starts with understanding your objectives, as there are many viewpoints on what threat intelligence is. Do you simply want a list of IP addresses to block or domains to refuse connections to? Do you need finished intelligence showing historical information about specific threat actors? Or do you want to get into the mind of an adversary to comprehend their motivations, targets and tactics? Answering first what you’re looking to get out of your threat intelligence efforts will determine what you’ll look for in a threat intelligence provider and how you’ll use it.

2. Choose relevant sources.

Once you have your objectives in place, choose relevant sources for your threat intelligence. Just because someone can provide you with a list of every bad IP that they've seen on the internet doesn't necessarily mean that data is relevant to your organization. For instance, you may be in a specific sector using unique technology, meaning you would need threat intelligence that's unique to those technologies. Having relevant sources can save your security team time wasted sifting through reports that don’t apply to you. It can also save you time during incident response as well, especially when it’s estimated that by 2031, a ransomware attack will happen every two seconds.

3. Integrate into existing tools.

Now that you’ve determined which threat intelligence best suits your needs, it’s time to understand how it integrates with your existing tools. Existing workflows typically revolve around a tool that does the heavy lifting, and threat intelligence will be a component that the tool has to carry. Ensure these integrations are possible: Will it integrate seamlessly? Will you need an API? Will it break your operation? Also, make sure it's affordable. Does the vendor charge for integrations, or does it mean investing in additional licensed users, features or functions?

4. Automate responses.

Once you integrate your threat intelligence into your existing tools, make sure that there's an automated process. Automation tasks could be updating firewalls or desktop policies or informing specific teams to remediate emerging risks. This will free up your security team to focus on higher-impact initiatives, as well as alleviate alert fatigue and reduce human error associated with manual tasks. When organizations use AI and automation together, the life cycle of a data breach was found to be 108 days shorter when compared to companies that didn't use them (214 days instead of 322 days), according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report.

5. Contextualize threat intelligence.

Threat intelligence must be relevant to your organization for you to successfully operationalize it. This is why you need to contextualize your threat intelligence as you begin to use it. As mentioned before, you can get a list of every bad IP that's been seen on the internet in the last 24 hours. But it's much more helpful and actionable to see the small fraction of those IPs that actually communicated with your systems or that appear to be interested in your organization or even your third-party suppliers. This is critical to removing layers of friction and the need for involving more highly paid experienced analysts for basic insights. This context helps you quickly understand the intelligence’s value and make informed decisions.

6. Ready your team.

Having relevant and insightful threat intelligence is worthless unless you know how to act upon it. Part of successfully integrating threat intelligence is making sure your team has the talents and capabilities to make use of it in their daily work. It sounds obvious, but often, someone trained to use a tool doesn't necessarily understand something new being added to that tool. Consider providing additional training and resources to make sure that your whole team understands what threat intelligence is, what you're hoping to get out of it and how to use it.

7. Collaborate on your results.

Finally, once you have these pieces in place, put your intelligence to use, see what your controls trigger on and make adjustments accordingly. Calibration is an ongoing effort—never finished, yet constantly improving. As you discover how your threat intelligence is working, collaborate with other CISOs within your sector and share your findings, insights and best practices. Most CISOs all have similar challenges they’re trying to solve, and implementing threat intelligence can be one of those things that can become a collaborative effort. Consider joining an ISAC specific to your sector—this provides connective tissue across the whole security team with others so you hear about threats impacting similar organizations to avoid being the next victim.

Better Threat Intelligence Starts Today

To more proactively protect your organization, integrate threat intelligence into your overall security approach. Identify your objectives, choose relevant threat intelligence sources, automate and contextualize your intelligence, train your team to make the most out of threat intelligence and then share your findings with other CISOs. These steps will help you experience the value of threat intelligence and make your teams more confident in protecting your organization.

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