Working from home has become a popular choice in the post-pandemic world, while business travel is common again. These factors increase the risk of careless use of shared internet connections and public Wi-Fi, making cybersecurity more critical than ever. Responding to threats reactively is no longer enough.
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) means information and insights about current and emerging cyber threats. In today’s complex cyber threat landscape, CTI is essential for resilient defences and staying ahead of new and emerging dangers.
A key benefit of CTI is that you can use it to anticipate cyber attacks. By gathering and analysing data about how cybercriminals operate, you can understand the dangers your organisation is facing, and where a cyber attack is most likely to come from.
This means you can move to a proactive cybersecurity strategy and shut out the attackers before they strike.
What is operational CTI?
Operational CTI delivers real-time information about active threats to your organisation and attack campaigns you’re facing.
For example, solutions such as Cybercheck that monitor compromised credentials can form part of your operational CTI. They alert you when a password belonging to someone in your organisation has been leaked. This means you can block the password before cybercriminals try to use it against you.
You can use operational CTI to strengthen your security posture and proactively defend your organisation against imminent threats. One way to do this is to integrate operational CTI into your threat detection and response.
Why integrate operational CTI into threat detection?
Integrating operational cyber threat intelligence (CTI) into threat detection means aligning your security operations with real-world attacker behaviour.
The goal is to make your detection smarter, faster, and more context-aware with information and insights into the tactics, tools, and infrastructure that attackers are using.
At its core, operational CTI focuses on timely, relevant intelligence that can be directly applied to detection technologies. For example, IP addresses, domain names, file hashes, and behavioural patterns.
The aim is to reduce dwell time, improve alert fidelity, and enable proactive defence.
To achieve this, integration must be deliberate and tailored to your organisation’s threat landscape.
Step 1: Map your existing detection stack
Map your existing platforms, such as your SIEMs, endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and cloud monitoring tools.
Each of these platforms can ingest CTI feeds. However, the key is to ensure the intelligence is curated and contextualised. Raw threat data is noisy. Operational CTI should be filtered to reflect threats that are relevant to your industry, geography, and digital footprint.
Step 2: Establish a CTI pipeline
You can source operational CTI from various sources and platforms. For example:
- Commercial threat intelligence platforms
- Open-source data feeds
- Information sharing and analysis centres (ISACs),
- Internal sources like honeypots and incident reports.
Normalise the data using standards like STIX/TAXII, and enrich it with metadata, such as threat actor attribution, confidence scores, and observed attack timelines.
This enrichment allows your detection tools to prioritise alerts and correlate events more effectively.
Step 3: Integrate CTI into your detection logic
You can do this in various ways. For example:
- In a SIEM, create correlation rules that flag traffic to known malicious IPs associated with ransomware campaigns active in your sector.
- In an EDR platform, block execution of binaries matching hashes from recent malware samples.
- In cloud environments, use CTI to inform anomaly detection by highlighting suspicious login patterns linked to credential stuffing attacks.
Example 1: Your CTI feed reports a surge in phishing domains impersonating a popular SaaS provider.
By integrating this intelligence into your email gateway and DNS filtering tools, you can pre-emptively block access to those domains.
At the same time, you can configure your SIEM to alert on authentication attempts from IPs associated with phishing, enabling rapid incident response.
Example 2: You’re in the financial sector, and CTI reveals a new malware strain targeting banking apps
By feeding this intelligence into your EDR and mobile threat defence systems, you can detect and quarantine the malware before it exfiltrates data.
The intelligence also informs your threat-hunting team. They can search proactively for indicators of compromise (IOCs) across your environment.
Step 4: Strengthen your endpoint detection and response (EDR)
Operational CTI can strengthen EDR by informing behavioural analytics.
If intelligence reports show that a specific threat actor uses DLL side-loading or exploits a particular vulnerability, configure your EDR to flag those behaviours.
Better yet, use CTI to guide threat hunting. Look for signs of known adversary activity based on current intelligence.
Step 5: Enhance your network detection and response (NDR)
CTI can inform anomaly detection models by highlighting emerging command-and-control infrastructure or novel exfiltration techniques.
Integrating intelligence about attacker infrastructure — such as malicious IPs or domains — into NDR systems allows for faster identification of suspicious traffic.
Again, context matters. A flagged IP is only useful if you know why it’s malicious and how it relates to broader campaigns.
Step 6: Don’t overlook cloud-native detection tools
As organisations migrate to hybrid environments, CTI must evolve too.
Intelligence about cloud-specific threats — such as abuse of IAM roles or exploitation of misconfigured storage buckets — should be fed into cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP).
This ensures that detection doesn’t only react to misconfigurations but also anticipates how attackers exploit them.
Step 7: Make your CTI actionable
Integrate the intelligence into automated workflows that trigger alerts, block traffic, or initiate incident response playbooks.
Also, ensure your teams understand the intelligence. Train analysts to interpret threat reports, map TTPs to MITRE ATT&CK, and use that knowledge to refine detection logic.
Operational CTI isn’t a silver bullet
However, when it’s integrated thoughtfully across detection layers, it transforms security from passive monitoring to active defence.
It’s not about drowning in data. Rather, it’s about surfacing the right signals, at the right time, in the right place. That’s how you stay ahead of adversaries, instead of just responding to them.
Transforming your security posture from reactive to anticipatory
Integrating operational CTI into your threat detection means your systems can recognise threats not only by signature but by behaviour and context. It also enables your security team to focus on high-value alerts, filter out noise, and respond more rapidly if an incident occurs.
Above all, as new threats constantly emerge, you can stay ahead of the cybercriminals and shut out attackers before they make your organisation their next target.
