One of the biggest limitations in modern cybersecurity is that we still tend to confine cyber threat…
James W. — Decision Intelligence Executive
One of the biggest limitations in modern cybersecurity is that we still tend to confine cyber threat intelligence to the SOC, as if its sole purpose is to enrich alerts, produce reports, and make analysts marginally more efficient. This means we are missing a much greater picture; at its core, intelligence has never really been about threats. Intel is about reducing uncertainty, so better decisions can be made. Militaries & businesses understand this, but for some inexplicable reason in cybersecurity, we often stop short of applying intelligence where it arguably creates the greatest value. We use it to explain attacks after they occur, while overlooking its ability to shape investment decisions, influence product roadmaps, inform supply chain strategies, prioritize vulnerabilities, guide resilience planning, and challenge assumptions made in boardrooms.
Imagine a security program where vulnerability management is driven not by severity scores, but by an understanding of which adversaries are actively targeting your industry. Imagine procurement decisions informed by intelligence about vendor compromises, geopolitical instability, and emerging supply chain risks. Imagine executives discussing cyber investments in terms of revenue preservation, operational continuity, customer confidence, and competitive advantage rather than tool counts and compliance obligations. Suddenly, intelligence stops being an operational support function and becomes a business capability.
I suspect this is where the next evolution of our profession lies. Security teams have spent years trying to prove they can protect the business. Perhaps the more valuable proposition is demonstrating that they can help the business make better decisions. Organizations that embrace this mindset may find themselves spending less time reacting to incidents, less money chasing technologies that fail to move the needle, and more time investing in initiatives that meaningfully reduce uncertainty and strengthen resilience.
The question I keep asking myself is whether we have unintentionally limited ourselves by treating CTI as a discipline focused on adversaries, when its greatest contribution may be helping organizations understand themselves. If intelligence can tell us what our competitors are doing, what threat actors are exploiting, where our dependencies exist, and which assumptions are most likely to fail under pressure, why would we reserve it for the SOC?
Perhaps it is time to stop asking how intelligence can support security operations and start asking how intelligence can support the business itself. That feels like a much more interesting conversation, and one that might finally move us beyond measuring success by alerts closed and incidents responded to; don't get me wrong I love to see a bump in the MTTD & MTTR metrics, but there is more to it than that. It is an undeniable fact that intel breeds clarity, and clarity breeds better decisions.
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Liam R.: Threat intelligence is used in offensive security as well - Threat-Led Penetration Testing (TLPT). In the UK the whole CHECK scheme, run by NCSC, was for government, CNI and MOD assessments where scopes were generally drawn up based on RMADS (Risk Management and Accreditation Document Set) where threat assessments directly influences the scope for penetration tests.