From Noise to Signal: Building Situational Threat Intelligence

Your inbox and news feeds fill with the latest information about cybersecurity threats. APT groups you’ve never heard of. Vulnerabilities in products you may have. IOCs that may or may not be relevant. Somewhere in that noise is a signal—information that actually matters to your organization. But finding and using it effectively feels exhausting.

If you’re leading security, you know this exhaustion intimately. For many, it’s a struggle to keep up with the regular firefighting and feels nearly impossible to focus on the strategic work that matters most.

If your team can’t chase all the noise, you’re not doing security wrong—you’re being realistic. It’s time for a different approach, one built on situational security—understanding your specific context, risks, and environment well enough to make strategic decisions about what actually matters.

The Tactical TI Treadmill

Most organizations treat threat intelligence as a matching game. Gather feeds. Ingest IOCs. Check if any match your logs. Repeat daily. This tactical focus creates a false sense of security. You’re doing something with threat intelligence and checking boxes in compliance frameworks, but are you making better decisions about where to invest? Are you preventing incidents that matter to your business?

The hard truth: probably not as much as you could.

Situational Security: Know Your Context

Here’s what changes everything: not every data point about historical cyber attacks is true threat intelligence—for something to be a real threat, it needs to have the potential to impact your organization.

Situational security means deeply understanding:

• Your most important assets: What assets, if compromised, would cause material business harm? Not the CMDB inventory—the real answer.
  
• Your exposure surface: What’s actually accessible to adversaries? Cloud infrastructure, remote access, third-party connections, supply chain relationships.
  
• Your threat landscape: Which threat actors have the capability and intent to target organizations like yours?
  
• Your blind spots: Where do you genuinely have control gaps versus defense-in-depth?
  

This context transforms how you consume threat intelligence. Instead of asking “Is this threat real?” you ask “Is this threat relevant to us?”

A vulnerability in a Palo Alto Networks product doesn’t matter if you run entirely on Fortinet. Ransomware campaigns targeting healthcare deserve attention if you’re a hospital, not if you’re a logistics company. An APT group focused on intellectual property theft from defense contractors probably isn’t studying your organization’s architecture.

Situational security isn’t about ignoring threats—it’s about proportional response and effective strategy based on actual risk.

What Strategic Intelligence Looks Like

Strategic threat intelligence answers questions that drive business decisions:

Bad question: “Did we see any of these 10,000 IOCs in our environment?”

Good question: “Are threat actors actively exploiting vulnerabilities in the technologies we use, and do we have compensating controls?”

Bad question: “How many alerts did our threat feed generate?”

Good question: “What security investments would reduce our exposure to the most likely and impactful threats we face?”

Strategic intelligence informs decisions about priorities, investments, and risk.

A Practical Framework

Whether you do or don’t have a dedicated threat intelligence team, strategic value comes from a focused process. This approach is especially valuable for small teams that can’t afford dedicated threat intelligence analysts, but even large organizations benefit from this focused methodology:

1. Define Your Threat Profile

Spend a few hours once a quarter documenting:

• Your industry, industry verticals, and subverticals
• Your technology stack (major platforms and frameworks used, not every laptop)
• Your geographic exposure
• Your most critical business processes and supporting assets

For a head start, you may be able to source some of this data from existing sources, such as business continuity and disaster recovery processes.

This becomes your filter. When new intelligence arrives, it’s evaluated against this profile.

2. Establish Decision Triggers

Not every piece of threat data demands action. Create simple criteria:

• Act immediately: Actively exploited vulnerability in exposed services we use
• Assess this week: New campaign targeting our industry
• Monitor: Threat activity relevant to our industry, but not our vertical
• File away: Everything else

Most threat data falls into “file away.” That’s okay. You’re not ignoring threats—you’re making informed decisions about relevance and priority.

3. Connect Intelligence to Action

Threat intelligence should change what you do. Each week, ask:

• Does this week’s intelligence suggest we should adjust our posture?
• Should we accelerate patching or other mitigating controls for specific vulnerabilities?
• Do we need to communicate new risks to specific business units?
• Should we test our controls against new techniques?

If the information doesn’t lead to action or decision, question whether it’s actual intelligence or just a “data feed”.

4. Measure What Matters

Track quarterly metrics that demonstrate strategic value:

• Security architecture and technology decisions influenced by intelligence
• Business investments accelerated, delayed, or canceled based on threat insights
• Detection and prevention capabilities added based on threat intelligence
• Risk discussions with leadership influenced by intelligence insights

These metrics tell a story about value, not activity.

Example in Practice: National Retail Chain

Consider a national retail chain with an expanding e-commerce presence:

Threat profile: Point-of-sale (POS) systems, e-commerce platforms, and payment card data are the most critical assets.

This quarter’s intelligence: Emerging trend shows adversaries pivoting from traditional POS attacks to exploiting third-party integrations in e-commerce platforms. Industry analysis reveals 70% of breaches now originate through supply chain attacks rather than direct attacks.

Decision trigger: ‘Assess this week’ – aligns with ongoing digital transformation and increasing reliance on third-party e-commerce plugins and payment processors.

Threat-informed actions:

• Incorporate threat intelligence into the vendor risk process
• Accelerate migration to tokenization for payment processing (moved up 8 months)
• Ensure cross-functional risk committees have the correct information to inform decision-making involving the evaluation of third-party integrations
• Include “supply chain compromise” scenarios in organizational table-top exercises

Metrics that matter: Intelligence insights justified $1.5M accelerated security investment; prevented onboarding of a high-risk vendor; executive team now requests intelligence briefings before major technology decisions.

Stop Boiling the Ocean

You don’t need a massive team or unlimited budget to do threat intelligence well. You need a solid process with clarity about what matters to your organization.

With the right, focused lens, threat intelligence can be more than a checkbox—it can be a strategic tool to communicate risk and secure the needed investments.