Why Your Threat Intelligence Program Is Failing—and How to Fix It in Days, Not Months

Most organizations’ threat intelligence programs are failing because they were not rolled out ready – they were rolled out ready to tinker with, as I’ve stated in a previous blog. This would be fine if today’s organizations had time to do that, but as any SOC can attest, they don’t.  

This leads to the perception of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) programs as clunky, tech-heavy platforms that function more as a long-term investment than a “right now” solution. That needs to change. 

Top Reasons CTI Programs Fail 

To understand the solution, it’s imperative to first fully grasp the problem. Today’s CTI programs are failing at their jobs because of: 

Too much technical complexity and not enough integration.  

Think about it. In an effort to make threat intelligence comprehensive, modern CTI has become a jumble of feeds, tools, and formats. That would be fine if integration wasn’t an issue, but it so often is, with threat analysts being left to do a lot of the work manually – be that configuration, correlation, or simple sorting and sterilization, expending far too much effort on connecting technology and data siloes. This state leaves too much burden on SOCs that are overtaxed as it is. Consequently, CTI programs stall or remain underutilized.  

Too much noise, not enough high-quality data.  

Half the work of CTI programs is bringing you raw swaths of data, and the other half still remains in vetting and sorting all this data out. When it comes in from various feeds and sources, it can be noisy and messy, full of redundancies, false positives, and flaws. Without any context or correlation, it’s as if these platforms gave up halfway through getting the job actually done. In cybersecurity, we are grasping for more information, but oftentimes we don’t know what to do with this data. CTI platforms need to do the whole job, and that means operationalizing data. 

Long time-to-value. 

Another huge issue is the fact that these programs don’t come ready out of the box. They are like a Lego set that needs to be customized and assembled when what companies are really looking for is a pre-built model; something that can deliver immediate value. This is especially troublesome when organizations only have so many resources (financial, human, time-related) and they invested all of them in a CTI solution that now requires even more. With programs that take months to become fully operational, teams with talent gaps, operational complexities, or simply better things to do won’t find value in a new tool they now have to assemble from scratch. And in the meantime, threat actors are grateful for an additional head start. On top of that, even if teams were to get the tools to a place where they could use them, the lack of expertise could mean many of the better, more powerful features go unused, or worse, unknown. 

The Solution: Industry-first Threat Intel Packaged Solution (“CTI In-a-Box") 

The answer is a simple one: deliver a CTI platform that does what it says it will do as soon as you get it. This “CTI in a box” concept is remarkably novel, although the need has been around for as long as the threats. 

To combat the burden of numerous integrations, ongoing platform configurations, and continuous enrichment, Cyware released its Intel Exchange + Team Cymru bundle. The result, Cyware Intel Packaged Solution, is a one-of-a-kind product on the CTI market that runs as soon as you open it and lets you get to value within a few days – not a few months.  

This pre-configured threat intelligence program effectively allows teams to bypass quarters of fine-tuning on deployment, configuration, and integration. Instead, organizations can leverage instant and seamless onboarding for a pre-configured CTI platform that’s up-and-running in less than a week’s time.  

The main difference? Now analysts get to spend their time analyzing, not aggregating, correlating, or sterilizing threat data.  

Threat Intel Packaged Solution Specs 

The Intel Packaged Solution is a heavy-hitting combination of best-in-class tools. It is: 

• Built on Cyware Intel Exchange: Our flagship Threat Intelligence Platform ingests, enriches, analyzes, prioritizes, shares, and even acts on the data it receives, automating all parts of the threat intelligence lifecycle. It automatically aggregates alerts, advisories, reports and bulletins for easy consumption, and a Hub and Spoke model facilitates bi-directional threat sharing for compliance with threat intel sharing requirements (like those in DORA). 
• Enriched with Cyware Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) content: Teams hit the ground running with a collection of pre-configured tags, rules, and searches along with pre-built integrations and automated enrichments. Cyware TIP is specifically built for high-volume threat intel operations, leveraging AI and ML to draw insights from raw data. This content is part and parcel of our Intel Packaged Solution.  
• Packaged with pre-bundled Team Cymru Premium Threat Feeds: These integrated premium threat feeds from Team Cymru give teams real-time visibility into C2 infrastructure, malware, botnets and external malicious activity, combining them all into an actionable data set that empowers rapid detection and response, even across sophisticated threats.  
• Coupled with Compromised Credential Management: This module integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions to pull information about compromised credentials and offers seamless domain monitoring and analysis. This empowers security teams to respond quickly via automation (or manual efforts if desired) and an easy user interface shows at-a-glance key insights like Total Breached Accounts, Accounts At Risk, VIPs At Risk, and more.  
• Equipped with Quarterback AI: Cyware Quarterback AI stands apart as a tech-agnostic solution purpose-built for the real-world complexities of cyber threat intelligence. It empowers organizations to select the most effective large language model (LLM) ensuring consistent, high-quality AI performance across both third-party tools and internal IT environments. With deep contextual intelligence and seamless integrations, Quarterback AI  enables CTI teams to make sharper and faster investigations and decisions without being locked into a single AI provider. 

Getting the Job Done This perfect storm of CTI technology finishes the job. It doesn’t just deliver half-baked information for your SOC to deal with later. Instead of losing time and burning out your experts, organizations that leverage Cyware Threat Intel Packaged Solution can offload distraction, complexity, and needless hassle in favor of a truly actionable approach. It is quite simply the fastest way to operationalize threat data on the market today. And immediately actionable data means that more time can be spent chasing down threats, not trying to decipher what they are. This means boots on the ground faster for incident response, and more of them. It also means that when time is of the essence, your CTI platform will be the last thing slowing you down.  CTA: Discover how the Cyware Intel Packaged Solution gets your threat intel program running in days. Explore the full solution now.