What is a Threat Intelligence Platform?

A threat intelligence platform (TIP) is a software solution that aggregates, correlates, and analyzes threat data from multiple sources to provide enterprises with relevant, accurate, and complete threat intelligence.

Modern threat intelligence platforms use a mix of automation technology, artificial intelligence, and human threat experts to monitor the public attack surface at scale, analyze threat indicators, and report on emerging threats. 

Threat intelligence platforms provide security teams with information and indicators about digital threat actors, emerging malware and fraud attacks, new software and network vulnerabilities, and other threats, driving use cases from threat hunting to incident investigation and response. 

What Are the Key Features of a Threat Intelligence Platform?

In today's rapidly evolving threat environment, a threat intelligence platform that simply provides information and indicators is not a sufficient cybersecurity tool. Attackers adjust their strategies regularly, which makes collections of indicators become outdated very quickly. Additionally, collected indicators do not show attacker motives or level of sophistication. Be sure to look for TIP solutions that integrate numerous sources of threat intelligence and allow users to easily apply that knowledge across their attack surface. Threat intelligence platforms ideally consolidate and de-duplicate data that is sourced from numerous intelligence feeds. Furthermore, the leading TIPs allow for a comprehensive understanding of how to neutralize threats which enables Improved Threat Detection, Enhanced Incident Response, Strategic Decision-Making, Comprehensive Threat Coverage, Efficient Resource Utilization, Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing, and Improved Security Posture. Threat detection should be automated and easy to integrate into leading detection cybersecurity tools such as real-time security analytics (SIEM), endpoint detection and response (EDR, XDR), attack surface management, vulnerability and asset management, and incident response.

How Do Threat Intelligence Platforms Work?

Threat intelligence platforms work by streamlining the cyber threat intelligence cycle to provide enterprise security teams with a consistent flow of relevant, timely, and actionable threat intelligence that informs strategic decision-making, resource allocation, and the implementation of new security controls to prevent attacks and mitigate risk.

A threat intelligence platform also creates a point of contact where security teams can access cybersecurity support and services from the platform provider. 

Here’s how threat intelligence platforms work to develop and distribute high-quality intel:

Collect and Aggregate Threat Data

Threat intelligence platforms aggregate and correlate threat data from multiple sources to discover potential threat indicators. 

Threat data may be collected from public sources (e.g. social media, the indexed web, threat research, software vulnerability reports, geopolitical news reports, public blacklists and threat databases, etc.), or from private ones (e.g. network telemetry data, the deep and dark web, covert operatives and informants, private threat data lakes, protected email inboxes and business collaboration tools, etc.)

Analyze and Correlate Data Using AI

Threat intelligence platforms use AI-driven processes to analyze threat data and search for correlations that indicate a compromised network or an emerging digital threat. 

AI unlocks threat intelligence at scale, allowing these platforms to detect textual, image, and video-based threat indicators from across the public attack surface by processing millions of data points every single day.

Threat Data Sorted, Validated, and Triaged by Human Experts

Once threat data has been gathered and analyzed by a combination of automation and AI-driven processes, human threat experts may review, sort, validate, and triage the data to identify the most important alerts and threat indicators that should be addressed by enterprise security teams.

Threat Intelligence Pushed to Platform Feeds

Threat data that has been reviewed, validated, and enriched by human analysts can be pushed to enterprise security teams via the threat intelligence platform, along with advice and recommended action steps for addressing the most urgent threats. 

Relevant, accurate, and complete threat intelligence helps security teams prioritize the most important actions and initiatives to safeguard their security posture against known and emerging threats.

Incident Response and Adversary Disruption

Threat intelligence platforms can help enterprise security teams detect security incidents, manage the incident response process, and execute countermeasures to disrupt cyber adversary infrastructure and discourage future attacks.

6 Threat Intelligence Platform Use Cases

Threat intelligence platforms support a number of valuable cybersecurity use cases that help enterprise security teams safeguard brands, people, and assets.

Security Planning and Incident Prioritization

Threat intelligence platforms provide information and strategic recommendations that help enterprise security teams determine which assets need protection, identify the biggest threats to those assets, and take the appropriate steps to safeguard them against cyber attacks. 

Threat platforms also help with incident prioritization, directing enterprise security teams to take action against the most urgent threats to enterprise cybersecurity.

Security Incident Response and Investigations

When a security incident occurs, threat intelligence platforms provide an interface where the software provider can support and manage the incident response process, and help with root cause investigations.

Fraud Prevention

Fraud takes place when a digital threat actor uses any kind of deception for personal gain. Brandjacking, business email compromise (BEC) attacks, domain and email spoofing, and executive impersonations are all forms of digital fraud that use deception to steal data or misappropriate financial resources from enterprise targets. 

A threat intelligence platform monitors the public attack surface to identify, detect, and disrupt fraudulent infrastructure (e.g. fake domains, email accounts, social profiles, etc.) before it can be used to defraud an organization, its employees, or its customers.

Breach Evidence and Data Leakage Detection

When an organization experiences data leakage or a breach, the leaked data may be posted on a paste site or shared in illicit dark web marketplaces and forums. Threat intelligence platforms collect and analyze data from these sources to help enterprise security teams detect and respond to data leakage.

When enterprises can rapidly identify and detect evidence of data leakage with a threat intelligence platform, they can work to engage the cyber adversary, recover their data, and minimize the overall cost and impact of the breach.

Threat Hunting

Threat intelligence platforms provide information about threat actors, targets, campaigns, and known threat indicators that can help security teams expose and remedy previously undiscovered attacks against their networks. 

Vulnerability Management

Threat intelligence platforms provide relevant and timely information about new software vulnerabilities, allowing security teams to prioritize patches and effectively manage vulnerabilities to prevent a data breach.

Why do companies need a Threat Intelligence Platform?

Modern threat data is growing ever more complex, and attacks are increasingly more sophisticated. Yesterday's approach of using multiple tools and process to manually collect threat data no longer works. Teams must act in near real-time when threats emerge, and overwhelmed security staff cannot keep up with the wide volume of data, variety of formats (JSON, XML, PDF, CSV, etc.), and disconnected methods of disseminating threat data for rapid remediation.

Security and threat intelligence teams are often inundated with data and alerts. Knowing which ones are legitimate threats – and which are noise – makes it nearly impossible to analyze and identify potential threats at the speed of attack.

Having a threat intelligence platform that can unify and analyze threat data in real-time allows security teams to focus their efforts on threats are are real, not waste time chasing ones that aren't.

Secure Your Enterprise with the ZeroFox Threat Intelligence Platform

ZeroFox provides enterprises protection, intelligence, and disruption to dismantle external threats to brands, people, assets, and data in one, comprehensive platform.

The ZeroFox platform leverages advanced AI-driven threat analysis and expert human threat intelligence services to identify complex threats, plus automated disruption capabilities to  neutralize attacker infrastructure.

Ready to learn more?

Check out our free white paper A Buyer’s Guide for Digital Risk Protection to discover the six criteria your organization should consider when selecting a threat intelligence platform to protect your digital presence.