Open-Source Security Operations Center (SOC)

13Threat Intelligence and Advanced Threat Hunting

Threat intelligence and proactive hunting empower security teams to uncover sophisticated threats that evade traditional protective controls. Intelligence provides context to focus hunts while hunting informs intelligence analysis to drive detection engineering. Together, these capabilities create an advanced defense cycle, securing complex environments against motivated adversaries through informed human–machine teaming.

The Role of Threat Intelligence in SOCs

Threat intelligence adds critical context to detect, prioritize, and respond to threats permeating borders and breaching barriers. Intelligence helps answer key questions:

• Who is attacking by attributing threats to known groups through unique tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) analysis?
• Why certain tactics are employed based on campaign objectives targeting specific data and systems?
• How do threats operate leveraging internal ground truth to validate external intelligence?
• What techniques impact our environment guided by specific vulnerability and asset relevance?

This context augments security operations efficacy, transforming commodity alerts into focused hunting guided by analytics purpose-built for the organization. Intelligence informs and enriches human understanding, defending complex environments.

Prioritizing Alerts and Incidents

The first area where intelligence delivers tangible value involves prioritizing alerts generated from the overwhelming ...