Practice : Threat Intelligence Feeds

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Threat Intelligence Feeds provide organisations with real-time insights into emerging cyber threats, indicators of compromise (IOCs), attacker tactics, and known vulnerabilities. They enhance detection, prevention, and response by supplying up-to-date data from trusted external sources.

By integrating threat intelligence into engineering and security workflows, teams can stay ahead of evolving risks, align defences to active threats, and make informed decisions about patching, blocking, and investigation priorities.

Description of the Practice

  • Feeds include curated threat data from commercial, open-source, industry-specific, and governmental sources (e.g. MITRE, AlienVault OTX, MISP, IBM X-Force, Recorded Future).
  • Content may include IP addresses, domain names, malware signatures, CVEs, tactics and techniques (e.g. MITRE ATT&CK), and breach disclosures.
  • Feeds are consumed by SIEMs, SOAR platforms, firewalls, IDS/IPS, and custom scripts for detection and automated response.
  • Used for contextual alerting, IOC enrichment, and proactive hunting.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Select relevant feeds based on your threat landscape, industry, and regulatory environment.
  • Integrate feeds with existing security infrastructure (e.g. Splunk, Sentinel, Elastic, Wazuh).
  • Start with IOC enrichment and alert correlation to improve incident triage.
  • Use threat data to prioritise patching and refine detection rules.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Tune feeds for relevance - filter out noise, false positives, and low-fidelity indicators.
  • Create playbooks that incorporate threat intelligence into SOC and incident response.
  • Use threat modelling to map feed insights to your systems and attack surface.
  • Share anonymised findings with industry ISACs or peer communities to contribute back.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Align threat intelligence use with practical risk reduction - not just data collection.
  • Treat threat data as a guide for detection tuning, not a block list to blindly ingest.
  • Collaborate between engineering and security teams to operationalise insights.
  • Review intelligence impact during postmortems and risk assessments.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Feed overload - too many sources without validation or filtering.
  • Irrelevant or outdated intelligence that triggers alert fatigue.
  • Automation without governance leading to false blocks or response errors.
  • Treating threat intelligence as a security-only function.

5. Signals of Success

  • Feeds enrich detection and response with relevant, timely context.
  • Engineering teams are aware of current threat activity relevant to their domains.
  • Investigations are faster and more targeted using IOCs and threat behaviour patterns.
  • Detection coverage improves with threat-informed rules and alerts.
  • Threat intelligence drives strategic decisions - not just reactive defences.