By Gaurav Mohan, VP Sales – APAC, India & Middle East, NETSCOUT
There is no shortage of debate and disagreement about many facets of cybercrime. However, what is universally accepted is that the cyberthreat landscape is constantly and rapidly evolving, and cybercriminals are very sophisticated, leveraging advanced AI capabilities to launch attacks more efficiently and effectively every day. This makes proactive threat intelligence critical for organizations to stay informed about emerging threats and tactics, be proactive in combating attacks and ensure they can prevent cyber-attacks from damaging their business.
Understanding curated threat intelligence
The process of selecting and validating raw threat data gathered from various sources and organizing it into a structured and actionable format is known as curated threat intelligence. It enhances an organization’s cybersecurity posture by providing insights into threat actors’ activities and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).
Improving one’s cybersecurity posture with up-to-date threat intelligence is a foundational element of any modern security stack. This enables automated blocking of known threats and reduces the workload on security teams while keeping the network protected. Curated threat intelligence also plays a broader role across cybersecurity strategies, like blocking malicious IP addresses from accessing the network to support intrusion prevention and defend against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Curated threat intelligence has several key features that make it very valuable to organizations:
Higher quality and accuracy: With in-depth vetting and verification of the data, curated threat intelligence has fewer false positives, making it more dependable.
Targeted relevance: This type of data is focused on key threat behaviors to ensure it is specific to an organization’s needs with reduced noise.
Improved context and enrichment: Curated threat intelligence goes beyond basic indicators to offer valuable context to improve understanding of threats, motives, and more.
Actionable: It is ready to be fed into cybersecurity solutions, including security information and event management systems (SIEMs), firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and more.
Ongoing improvement: The data is dynamic and evolving, adapting to new threats and constantly being updated with the latest threat intelligence.
Curated Threat Intelligence can be strategic, operational, tactical, or technical, depending on its focus and content. Bringing together different types of curated threat intelligence has several benefits, like strategic threat intelligence’s broad view is great for CIOs and CISOs to help guide the holistic security strategy for the organization, while tactical threat intelligence is more valuable to practitioners who are in the details of the data on a day-to-day basis.
The Threat Intelligence Lifecycle
The threat intelligence lifecycle typically includes several steps to improve an organization’s security posture that follows and structured and iterative closed-loop process:
1. Planning and direction: Defining the scope, priorities, and objectives, which include identifying key stakeholders, determining critical assets and data, outlining intelligence gaps, and evaluating existing threat intelligence sources for improvement.
2. Data collection: Gathering data from internal sources such as logs, incident reports, and external sources like the honeypots, TI feeds, industry forums, among others, to build a curated threat intelligence database.
3. Data processing: Organizing, standardizing, and enriching the collected data to make it suitable for analysis.
4. Analysis: Analyzing processed information to understand threats and develop actionable insights regarding profiles, behaviors, potential impacts, and intelligence gaps.
5. Dissemination: Sharing analyzed and tailored intelligence with different stakeholders to determine corrective actions to be taken.
6. Feedback: Process review and improvements based on learnings and feedback.
AI- and ML-driven automation across the threat intelligence lifecycle helps organizations accelerate the time-to-value. By minimizing the human interaction with raw data, the right people spend more time analyzing and making sense of the valuable insights that flow from the data.
Value of Curated Threat Data
Organizations overwhelmed by massive amounts of cybersecurity data can gain clarity and control with curated threat intelligence. By validating, enriching and verifying the data, curated intelligence dramatically reduces false positives and noise, enabling security teams to focus on the most relevant and credible threats.
Improved accuracy and certainty accelerates time-to-knowledge, sharpens prioritization based on threat severity and potential impact, and ensures resources are applied and deployed where they matter most. With higher confidence and certainty, teams can respond to incidents faster and more decisively, while also shifting from reactive to proactive and ultimately preventative – using known adversary indicators and patterns to investigate threats, strengthen controls, and stop attacks before they cause damage.
Curated threat Intelligence transforms one’s cybersecurity from reactive to resilient. Delivering context-rich indicators, adversary motives, and proven TTPs, enables faster detection, sharper prioritization, and more decisive response across the security stack. From blocking DDoS attacks to accelerating threat investigation, vulnerability management and incident triage, curated threat intelligence empowers teams to stay ahead of sophisticated threats – strengthening defenses, improving operational resilience, and protecting the user experience.