Threat intelligence feeds: essential arsenal in cybersecurity

Cyber threats are relentless, sophisticated, and growing. To stay ahead, you can no longer treat threat intelligence as an optional tool—it’s the backbone of a proactive, defense-ready strategy. Threat intelligence feeds bring crucial insights to security teams, from high-level trends to detailed indicators of compromise (IoCs).

But no single feed can capture every potential threat. Threat landscapes evolve rapidly and adversaries employ diverse techniques and targets. This reality requires organizations to use a mix of feeds, each contributing unique insights that, when combined, offer a more comprehensive view of risk.

Our recent survey of dozens of organizations found a broad spectrum of approaches, needs, and preferences in the threat intelligence space. This highlights how SOC teams customize their feeds to best suit their risk profile and objectives.

While some organizations rely heavily on tactical feeds to power their SOC, others prioritize strategic feeds for executive insight. This variety isn’t just a preference—it’s a direct response to the need for tailored, effective protection.

Categories of threat intelligence feeds

A threat intelligence feed is a stream of curated data that provides actionable insights about potential or active cyber threats, including malicious IPs, domains, file hashes, and attack patterns. While threat intelligence encompasses a variety of data, feeds generally fall into four main types. Each type has a distinct purpose, from providing real-time alerts to strategic guidance:

1. Strategic feeds: Offering intelligence on high-level trends, emerging risks, and attack vectors, these feeds support security leaders in planning and resource allocation.

2. Operational feeds: Focused on active threats, these feeds monitor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) currently used by attackers, giving SOC teams the insights to prepare for relevant threats.

3. Technical feeds: Highly detailed, they provide actionable data for immediate response. Technical feeds are indispensable for blocking known threats because they supply specific indicators of compromise, such as IP addresses, domains, and malware hashes.

4. Tactical feeds: These feeds are designed for quick reaction, providing live data that helps SOCs respond rapidly to incidents as they unfold.

No single feed captures every threat vector or covers every evolving attack. Many organizations adopt a blend of feed types to address these limitations, optimizing coverage and providing a more comprehensive view of potential risks.

Meeting core needs with threat intelligence feeds

Threat intelligence feeds serve a variety of functions for security teams, forming the backbone of modern cybersecurity frameworks:

1. Proactive threat detection: Organizations need early warning capabilities to stay ahead of attackers. Intelligence feeds enable security teams to spot potential threats, helping them recognize suspicious activity like unauthorized domains or harmful IP addresses before these threats infiltrate internal systems.

2. Strengthened incident response and investigation: Intelligence feeds act as a crucial asset during or after an attack, allowing teams to interpret the incident with greater context. By identifying the attacker’s methods and patterns, security teams can respond precisely and close security gaps faster.

3. Alert enrichment for enhanced SOC efficiency: Alert enrichment is a critical application of threat intelligence feeds. When alerts are enriched with contextual information—such as the severity of a threat, TTPs associated with a detected indicator, or connections to known campaigns—SOC analysts can make faster, more informed decisions. Enrichment transforms raw alerts into actionable intelligence, reducing time spent on triage and increasing response efficiency.

4. Informed security decisions at the executive level: Security leaders need more than tactical alerts; they require insights that support strategic decisions, ensuring security investments align with long-term goals and emerging threat trends. Strategic feeds provide high-level information that supports planning and risk mitigation.

Each organization’s unique environment, available resources, and priorities influence how they leverage intelligence to meet these needs.

How organizations use threat intelligence feeds

Our survey of dozens of organizations provided valuable insights into various threat intelligence approaches today.

There’s no single approach to threat intelligence. While some organizations prioritize technical feeds to drive their SOC, others emphasize strategic feeds for high-level decision-making. For example, 65% of respondents cited operational feeds as critical for daily SOC operations, while 40% identified strategic feeds as valuable for executive-level planning.

That variation of need extends to a range of sectors that all face varied threats. Organizations are responding by prioritizing industry-specific intelligence. For example, healthcare respondents favored feeds focused on data breaches and ransomware, reflecting the sector’s commitment to protecting sensitive patient data, including HIPAA compliance.

Retail respondents, by contrast, concentrated on payment security and e-commerce vulnerabilities. For these sectors, relevant intelligence that reflects their unique risks has become a top priority.

Many respondents emphasized the importance of real-time technical and tactical feeds, with nearly 75% reporting that immediate alerts give their SOCs the edge in incident response. These feeds make identifying and prioritizing high-severity threats easier, especially for smaller security teams.

With a growing number of intelligence providers available, organizations want more customization. Several respondents shared that they use customizable feeds to hone in on high-priority threats, reducing noise and enabling more efficient focus. Feeds adjustable to specific use cases have become increasingly popular, reflecting a need for precision over volume.

Nearly half of the survey respondents reported using open-source intelligence (OSINT) feeds, leveraging community-driven data to supplement commercial options. Although these feeds don’t replace paid intelligence, they offer an extra layer of awareness, adding valuable context at no additional cost.

Real-world examples: using threat intelligence feeds in practice

Survey feedback highlighted several practical ways organizations use threat intelligence feeds to strengthen their security operations:

1. Spotting suspiciousdomain activity early

   • Organizations use technical feeds to track domain registrations that resemble their brand names, preventing phishing and typosquatting before they impact users. This early detection has become essential for protecting both reputation and customer trust.

2. Alert enrichment with operational feeds

   • Enrichment is a common use case, allowing SOCs to add context to alerts, increasing their specificity and relevance. Organizations can streamline alert triage and improve response times by correlating alerts with known TTPs and threat actor profiles. For example, when an alert matches a known threat actor’s IoCs, it is elevated to high priority, helping SOC teams respond faster and more effectively.

3. Guiding investment with strategic intelligence

   • High-level intelligence guides security investments and anticipates emerging threats in regulated finance-related industries. Organizations use strategic feeds to predict threat patterns and allocate resources where they’ll have the most impact.

How to choose the right combination of threat intelligence feeds

If you’re refining your threat intelligence strategies, selecting the right blend of feeds is key. Here are considerations for making the best choices:

1. Align feeds with business goals: Intelligence feeds should align with an organization’s top risks and regulatory obligations. For instance, financial services may prioritize fraud intelligence, while tech companies focus on intellectual property protection.

2. Focus on quality over volume: More data isn’t always better in threat intelligence. Curated, high-quality feeds help reduce noise and prevent alert fatigue, allowing SOCs to focus on high-impact insights.

3. Leverage automation to boost efficiency: Many threat intelligence platforms now incorporate automation, making it easier for organizations to filter and correlate data quickly. Automation lets you triage high-priority alerts faster and reduces the manual effort required to parse incoming intelligence.

4. Customizable feeds for specific use cases: As the survey shows, feeds tailored to focus on specific threats are a growing necessity. Organizations can reduce noise and optimize their response efforts by narrowing the scope.

The future of threat intelligence: customization and contextual insight

The survey data makes one thing clear: threat intelligence feeds are essential to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. However, intelligence needs are as unique as organizations themselves, and as threats continue to grow in complexity, so will the need for tailored industry-specific insights. The trend is moving toward feeds offering customization and contextual relevance, enabling security teams to maintain an edge without being buried in extraneous data.

Organizations that remain agile and adaptable in their intelligence strategies will be best equipped to handle whatever threats arise next. In a field that demands constant vigilance, a flexible approach to threat intelligence isn’t just beneficial but necessary.

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