How Top Threat Intelligence Platforms Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Strategy

Most organisations prioritise strengthening their cybersecurity strategy, and rightly so — hackers can cause enormous financial and reputation damage. Crime rings have commercialised attack tools and services, enabling less technical threat actors to launch sophisticated data breaches.

Investing in a threat intelligence platform is crucial for mitigating cybercrime. This specialised software solution helps your company outsmart and neutralise hackers if and when they attack. What are the best threat intelligence platforms? How can they boost your security posture? Discover their merits, your best bets and how to compare them.

 

Benefits of Using a Powerful Cyberthreat Intelligence Platform

 

Here are key ways a leading threat intelligence platform strengthens your cybersecurity strategy.

 

Understanding the Threat Landscape Better

This technology helps you stay current with the dynamic cybercrime landscape. For example, the FBI said phishing was the most reported cyberattack in 2023. Hackers used unsolicited emails, telephone calls and text messages to trick victims into divulging sensitive information. Cybercriminals will continue to use the same tactics as long as they work, but expect them to develop novel schemes as new technologies emerge.

Monitoring what old and new adversaries are up to is essential to staying ahead of any malicious entity willing and able to disrupt an enterprise’s operations and steal confidential information.

 

Improving Risk Management

Companies have finite resources, so every penny counts to maximise cybersecurity. Spending funds prudently is vital in identifying and stopping threat actors that pose a genuine danger.

This software solution evaluates threats’ risk profiles based on their motivations, means and methods. This information allows you to create correct policies and allocate resources to the right places to improve threat detection and protection.

 

Increasing Employee Awareness

Quality threat intel is invaluable in employee education. Raising awareness of trending cyberattacks helps prevent critical team members from getting compromised. 

A reliable threat intelligence platform helps departments collaborate to establish proactive cyberdefence. It allows organisations to coordinate with external partners and build a unified strategy to keep hackers at bay.

 

Enhancing Incident Response

This service helps IT teams and security operations centres (SOCs) handle breaches better. A threat intelligence platform provides a comprehensive view of cybercriminals, nation-state actors and insider threats — what they do, what they target, how they do it and how much damage they have caused to other organisations.

Threat data combined with context contributes to cyberattack readiness. These help you respond to threats more precisely and dismantle them at their root.

 

Detecting Threats Fast

This software solution collects and correlates real-time threat data. This capability helps cybersecurity professionals identify attack patterns early enough to address them before they escalate.

A threat intelligence platform automates defences by orchestrating activities typically done manually. Agile IT teams and SOCs mitigate security breaches more effectively.

 

 

5 Best Threat Intelligence Platforms

 

Many threat intelligence platforms handle the basics well, but these five stand above the rest.

 

ThreatConnect

ThreatConnect is perfect for large enterprises with complex, mature security environments and financial risk quantification requirements. This solution scours hundreds of open-source intelligence and internal databases, including industry-specific feeds, to yield quality intel through source diversity. It maximises artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes, analyse raw data and contextualise threats. Its recommendations are financial-impact-based and board-friendly.

This threat intelligence platform has an intuitive web interface, configurable dashboards, tailored threat models and industry-specific customisations. It supports 100-plus integrations, is scalable and globally deployable and offers strong technical support. ThreatConnect’s pricing is flexible and quote-based.

 

Recorded Future Intelligence Platform

Recorded Future offers an enterprise-grade threat intelligence platform with extensive data coverage and strong automation capabilities. It excels in intelligence quality, contextualisation and scalability to satisfy demanding cybersecurity requirements. AI-powered analytics ensure precise attack pattern detection and actional recommendation generation.

The Intelligence Platform has 400-plus prebuilt integrations, and its flexible API lets developers connect it to specific systems and apps for any use case. Recorded Future offers limited customisation but excels in technical support. Although its prices are higher than some of the best threat intel platforms, its modular pricing model means you can choose and pay only for the features your corporation needs.

 

Anomali ThreatStream

ThreatStream by Anomali has an industry-leading threat intelligence repository. Its versatile collection method lets it pull data from hundreds of diverse feeds. This platform curates high-quality intelligence using deep contextual analysis, confidence scoring and severity rating. It removes old and obsolete data, gleaning clear, actionable insights from only timely information.

ThreatStream automates threat hunting, incident response workflows and compliance reporting. It integrates with over 200 security tools and has a centralised reservoir of raw threat data that minimises scaling costs. Anomali claims to charge less than most of the best cyberthreat intelligence platform vendors and quotes a custom price based on unique requirements.

 

CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary Intelligence

CrowdStrike designed Falcon Adversary Intelligence to monitor the dark web to gather information from underground communities and criminal forums. This platform can uncover and profile threat actors on end-to-end encrypted communication apps like Telegram. It conducts real-time threat research and analysis, provides adversary-specific context and supports expert curation to produce high-quality intelligence and keep false positive rates low.

Falcon Adversary Intelligence lets your team tailor hunting queries, detection rules, threat briefings and more. It reports findings with nontechnical senior executives in mind. CrowdStrike takes pride in providing outstanding technical support. Giant companies and government agencies seeking a scalable platform would appreciate its tiered pricing model.

 

IBM X-Force

X-Force by IBM attracts corporations, critical infrastructure organisations and managed security service providers because of its malware reverse engineering capabilities, industry-specific AI-driven threat contextualisation, strategic intel assessments, actionable findings and executive-level reporting. This platform uses 100-plus data sources, keeping an eye on darknets, open-source intelligence feeds and global threat research documents from 170 countries.

This software solution has 700-plus integrations, aids compliance and offers 24/7 support. X-Force licensing has custom enterprise-level pricing and is subject to change as you scale. Its 30-day trial inspires confidence and lowers the financial risk of adopting a new threat intel platform.

 

Comparing the Best Threat Intelligence Platforms

 

Powerful features and quality output separate the best threat intelligence platforms from the decent ones. Consider these factors to evaluate your options.

• Data sources: Know the breadth of internal and external data sources a solution uses to gather timely, substantial information, resulting in quality intel.
  
• Contextualisation: Look for a platform that adds context to raw data to help cybersecurity professionals identify relevant threat intelligence and prevent false positives.
  
• Recommendation actionability: Subscribe to a service that provides concrete, digestible steps for neutralising threats to aid decision-making.
  
• Automation: Learn about the processes a software solution automates to conserve your team’s attention and bandwidth for more mentally challenging tasks.
  
• Analytics and reporting: Determine whether a platform analyses and reports strategic, tactical or operational threat intelligence and how clearly it presents findings to intended audiences.
  
• Ease of use: Book a demo to see how intuitive a threat intelligence platform’s dashboard is and assess its overall usability to improve incident response times.
  
• Integration: Find out which tools you can link to a software solution to seamlessly move threat intel data and implement a unified cybersecurity strategy.
  
• Customisation: Note which platform elements you can customise to suit different preferences, backgrounds and experience levels.
  
• Scalability: Sign up for a service that can handle larger volumes of data as needed to adapt to new threats as your organisation grows.
  
• Support: Use a threat intelligence software vendor that extends multichannel technical support and helpful resources to maximise the platform and troubleshoot issues.
  
• Compliance: Ensure a platform complies with all relevant data protection laws to safeguard people’s privacy rights when handling personally identifiable information.
  
• Pricing: Understand a vendor’s pricing model to know how much it would cost to access the features your organisation needs relative to your team’s size and future needs.

 

Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Strategy With the Best Threat Intelligence Platform

 

Actionable cyberthreat intelligence is non-negotiable to neutralising online threats and protecting your organisation from new and old breeds of hackers. Explore each platform’s features to find the perfect fit.