Top tips for successful threat intelligence usage

Enterprises looking to stem the tide of breaches and attacks usually end up purchasing a threat intelligence platform (TIP). These can take one of several forms, including a managed cloud-based service or a tightly coupled tool collection that provides a wider risk management profile by tying together threat detection, incident response and vulnerability management. More than a dozen vendors offer TIPs. The key to successfully using these tools is understanding what they can and can’t do, matching them with your own environment and level of security sophistication. Also, being able to integrate them with other security tooling and defensive activities.

There are some common mistakes that CISOs make when considering these tools, including having a solid risk management program, relying on bad threat intelligence, gathering the wrong requirements or inappropriate threat sources, and not being more strategic in choosing the right tools. We’ll now dive into more specific tips to make the most successful and effective TIP purchase and usage.

Focus on good intelligence rather than quantity

First off, you need to examine the actual threat feeds that are being used as source material, and how many different feeds are being processed. This means not being focused on the total number but taking a deeper dive into what data is being collected, and understanding how the TIP consolidates these threats, enriches them with various metadata, and catalogs them in a query-friendly data structure.

What makes this enrichment possible and more effective is how the threat intel corpus supports various protocols, such as Trusted Automated Exchange of Indicator Information (TAXII) and Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX), both of which enable a transfer of richer metadata and specifics. STIX defines the “what” of a potential threat while TAXII defines “how” the threat happened. The two standards are maintained by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. Taken together, they can be used to characterize the motivations and capabilities of each threat, along with suggested responses, and be used to drive various automated processing and collaborative remediation activities.

Part of the enrichment process is also normalizing the duplicate threats that are collected and filtering out any false positives or irrelevant data. For example, if you don’t have specific Windows versions on your endpoints, there is no need to have a threat feed full of them. Many TIPs use various automated and AI-based routines to filter their feeds. “This can be a double-edged sword: you might get more data but also more noise to filter out,” Or Lev, VP of sales engineering at Kela told CSO.

Make sure you don’t have more intel than you need

Next is the matching phase: the most sophisticated TIP may be overkill if you have a small infosec department with limited skills or have a relatively simple computing environment. According to this 2025 report from Greynoise, threat feeds must match your own environment in terms of diversity, the level of complexity of potential threats to the diversity and complexity of your clouds and endpoints.

This includes being able to view threats from both the virtual and physical elements of your computing and applications infrastructure, as various analysts have written about. “Understanding the threat landscape is more than just looking at the threats, it involves understanding the external and internal factors that directly influence or enable the threats to materialize,” Stuart Peck, who has worked for numerous security vendors and wrote.

How you manage your post-incident workflow

The better TIPs can orchestrate any number of responses and mitigations to stop the threat and remediate the problems that result from a compromised computing element. “The value of threat intelligence is directly tied to how well it is ingested, processed, prioritized, and acted upon,” wrote Cyware in their report. This means a careful integration into your existing constellation of security tools so you can leverage all your previous investment in your acronyms of SOARs, SIEMs and XDRs. According to the Greynoise report “you have to embed the TIP into your existing security ecosystem, making sure to correlate your internal data and use your vulnerability management tools to enhance your incident response and provide actionable analytics.”

The keyword in that last sentence is actionable. Too often threat intel doesn’t guide any actions, such as kicking off a series of patches to update outdated systems, or remediation efforts to firewall a particular network segment or taking offline an offending device.

Being actionable is also a matter of paying attention to the timing of two different metrics. First, this intel should be able to shorten the time between detection and remediation, as exploits become operational faster. Second, the intel should shed some light and understanding about what threats are happening in real time and which ones can be thwarted or quickly stopped. 

Having actionable intelligence enables the visualization of a potential threat. A 2023 report from ThreatConnect states that “the ability to take action on intelligence directly within a dynamic visual environment is critical to making analysts more efficient and effective when doing their analysis. Visual analysis allows analysts to see patterns and find connections that may be difficult in other mediums like tables of data.”

Another part of making visual analytics is how the threat dashboards display this information in a way that can be helpful and actionable. The best dashboards can show real-time trends or anomalies. For example, a dashboard can point to when a server is under a DDoS attack or when a set of resources residing on one network segment is taken offline. Part of the visualization process is also making sure your organization has defined success measures of a TIP, usually in the rate of detecting threats and reducing subsequent incidents.

All of these elements are important in making threat intel part of your security operations, something that Recorded Future’s Esteban Borges wrote about in 2024 when it comes to triaging this intelligence into one of three basic categories:

• Strategic, or higher-level insights and identifying trends
• Tactical, or the more mechanics behind a particular threat and
• Operational, providing more real-time or near-real-time analysis

This is a delicate balancing act, to be sure, because realistically you need to touch on all three categories to properly defend your infrastructure. Part of the challenge here is to prevent siloed specialty mindsets from making the appropriate remedial measures. “I’ve seen time and time again when the threat intel or even the vulnerability management team will send out a flash notification about a high priority threat only for it to be lost in a queue because the threat team did not chase it up. It’s just as important for resolver groups to act as it is for the threat team to chase it,” Peck blogged. As an example, having a single phishing attempt could be a tactical issue, until your TIP flags similar events that show persistent evidence of a targeted attack that could mean operational changes to counter these attempts. Context matters and TIPs can help provide this.

Understand how AI-enhanced tools work

Some of the TIP vendors manage their workflows using AI-enhanced tools and other automated techniques. Given that AI is so popular, this means you must understand how this automation is constructed and what its limitations are. For example, one limitation may be how the AI software learns from consuming data from your threat feeds. Like any use of AI, the devil is in the details. Drawing on years of investigations for Dutch law enforcement, Niko Dekens called this the “slow collapse of critical thinking due to AI. AI-based tools should trigger suspicion, not satisfaction. Analysts need to question AI’s claims and compare its output to real-world source behavior.” That is an important distinction that needs to be kept top-of-human-mind.

If all this seems like a lot of work, that is because it is. TIPs aren’t simple products either to evaluate or to use, and managing threats means you must consider all entry points to your infrastructure, applications, and servers.