Key Takeaways

• Threat intelligence and threat hunting are two distinct yet complementary disciplines. Both are essential to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.
• Threat intelligence guides proactive defense, providing context on who might attack, what their motives and attacks are, and which indicators to watch for.
• Threat hunting finds what defenses miss by continuously investigating systems for anomalies and hidden indicators to catch stealthy attackers that evade automated tools.
• Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud unifies threat intelligence and threat hunting, gathering real-time threat data from across the open web, dark web, and technical sources into a single platform.

Clarifying Two Critical Security Disciplines

Threat intelligence and threat hunting are two cornerstone practices in modern cybersecurity, serving different but complementary roles. At the most basic level, threat intelligence is about understanding threats outside the organization, while threat hunting is the active pursuit of threats already within an organization’s network or systems.

The two functions work best in tandem, but because they are so closely related, they are often misunderstood or conflated. However, the stakes for getting it right are high—cyber threats are growing more advanced and costly, with the global average cost of a data breach reaching $4.4 million. Organizations that invest in both proactive threat hunting and a well-developed threat intelligence program are better positioned to improve security, decision-making, and incident preparedness. And understanding the distinction between the two helps security leaders leverage the right teams and processes for each.

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat intelligence is the practice of gathering and analyzing information about current and emerging threats to help defenders make informed decisions. At its core, threat intelligence is about understanding who is attacking, why they’re doing it, and how they operate.

Threat intelligence teams collect data from a wide range of sources and organize it into actionable insights. This process typically involves:

1. Collecting raw data: Data can come from internal feeds as well as from external sources and research. Threat intelligence teams will pull in indicators of compromise (IOCs), like malicious IPs, domains, malware hashes, phishing emails, and more.
2. Analyzing and contextualizing: Teams will then correlate the data to identify threats and patterns, looking for context to inform who is behind an attack, understand their motivations, and determine the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) being used.
3. Disseminating intelligence: Threat intelligence is growing in importance across all business functions. Once data has been collected and analyzed, it gets shared with any other teams who might need it, from SOC analysts and incident responders to risk managers and executives.

There are several levels or types of threat intelligence, each serving a different purpose:

• Strategic intelligence – high-level trends and insights for non-technical audiences (e.g., CISOs, business leaders) that inform policies and long-term strategies
• Operational intelligence – details on specific campaigns, threat actors, or attacks in progress that provide defenders with information like attack timelines or tools used
• Tactical intelligence – TTPs and IOCs that inform real-time defense, used directly by SOC teams to tune detection systems
• Technical intelligence – highly technical data usually meant for machine consumption or enrichment of security tools (sometimes overlaps with tactical intelligence but is often more granular and feeds into automation)

Ultimately, the purpose of threat intelligence is to enable proactive, evidence-based decision-making in cybersecurity. It reduces uncertainty and helps security teams more effectively allocate resources to mitigate threats before they impact the business. And organizations that prioritize maturing their threat intelligence programs will be better positioned to anticipate emerging threats and shore up defenses before an attack strikes.

What is Threat Hunting?

Threat hunting is a proactive investigative practice in which security analysts actively look for signs of malicious activity or compromise that have evaded traditional security defenses. Threat hunting assumes that attackers may already be lurking in networks and systems undetected and seeks to find them through expert analysis and intuition.

Key aspects of threat hunting typically include:

• Hypothesis-driven investigations: Threat hunters often begin with a hunch or educated guess about a potential threat and then seek evidence to prove or disprove that hypothesis.
• Behavioral analysis and anomaly detection: Hypothesis-driven investigations often stem from careful behavioral analysis (identifying suspicious patterns in system or user behavior) and anomaly detection (scrutinizing logs and telemetry for anything that doesn’t fit normal patterns).
• Specific usage of tools and data: Threat hunters leverage common tools (such as SIEM platforms, EDR solutions, and network analysis tools) but use them in a more proactive way. They also use threat intelligence platforms or feeds to enrich what they find and correlate hints across multiple data sources to uncover stealthy threats.

Instead of only responding after an incident, threat hunting aims to catch intrusions in their early stages or discover ongoing attacks that haven’t even been noticed yet. Common techniques include:

• Searching for known IOCs based on threat intelligence
• Tracking TTPs using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and looking for evidence of specific tactics
• Leveraging machine learning and advanced analytics to help surface unusual patterns across large data sets
• Ensuring continuous and iterative hunting, refining hypotheses and adapting quickly

Essentially, threat hunting is a human-driven, proactive hunt for hidden threats. It requires skilled analysts who think like attackers and have the curiosity and patience to dig into data and pursue hidden leads. With a mature threat hunting program, an organization can speed up detection and containment, ultimately leading to less damage from breaches.

Threat Intelligence and Threat Hunting: Key Differences

Threat intelligence and threat hunting are closely related, but it’s important to understand how they differ across several dimensions—such as focus, timing, outputs, and primary users—which in turn helps inform how to best leverage the two practices most effectively.

Despite these differences, threat intelligence and threat hunting are both essential for an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. In fact, using one without the other leaves a significant gap—knowing about threats isn’t useful if an organization is not looking for them internally, and hunting blindly without intelligence is inefficient.

How Threat Intelligence Powers Threat Hunting

Threat intelligence and threat hunting are deeply interconnected strategies that, when executed correctly, can deliver a more thorough security and protection plan for organizations. Threat intelligence in particular often serves as the necessary fuel for successful threat hunting.

There are several ways that threat intelligence powers threat hunting:

• Guiding hypotheses and focus areas: Threat intelligence provides the starting point for many threat hunts, acting as a roadmap that highlights where threat hunters should look first or what TTPs to look out for.
• Providing indicators and context: Threat hunters rely on threat intelligence feeds for high-confidence IOCs that they can search for in log data. Threat intelligence also adds helpful context to any suspicious events threat hunters may find, making the search more efficient and effective by enriching data with meaning.
• Enabling proactive hunting for emerging threats: Intelligence about external vulnerabilities and exploits can prompt internal hunts to ensure that defenses held up or to catch any successful penetration early, before any damage is caused.
• Improving hunting tools and analytics: Integrating threat intelligence feeds into security monitoring tools (SIEMs, EDRs, etc.) effectively bakes intel into the hunting process, allowing threat hunters to better prioritize their investigations.

Overall, threat intelligence and threat hunting operate in a feedback loop: intelligence guides threat hunters on where to look, and whatever they find feeds back into the overall intelligence picture. Each makes the other stronger, and together they enable a much more proactive and informed defense.

Benefits of Combining Threat Intelligence and Threat Hunting

How exactly does an organization benefit by integrating their threat intelligence and threat hunting operations? When both practices are used in concert, the results can immeasurably strengthen an organization’s overall security effectiveness.

Benefits of integration can include:

• Faster detection of advanced threats: A combined approach helps identify stealthy attacks sooner than either practice alone. When threat hunters are boosted by threat intelligence, they can zero in on serious threats that automated systems might have missed, reducing dwell time and limiting breach impacts.
• More effective prioritization of alerts and resources: Integration helps teams differentiate noise from truly critical warnings. Context like risk scores, known malicious indicators, or prevalence of a threat allows threat hunters and SOC analysts focus on what matters most.
• Stronger overall security posture and resilience: Perhaps the biggest payoff of combining threat intelligence and threat hunting is a more robust and dynamic defense. With the internal vigilance from threat hunting and the external knowledge gained from threat intelligence, the two functions effectively cover both preparation and detection.
• Adaptive, intelligence-driven defense: The ability to adapt to threats in real-time is a major benefit to a well-integrated security program. Swapping information quickly between threat intelligence and threat hunting makes an organization more responsive and resilient.

Threat intelligence and threat hunting can certainly be used independently, and each has the potential to provide useful knowledge to strengthen defenses. But there’s no doubt that an integrated approach transforms an organization’s security strategy from a reactive endeavor to a proactive, intelligence-driven mission.

How Recorded Future Utilizes Threat Intelligence and Threat Hunting Together

The right tools and platforms play a crucial role in helping organizations bring together threat intelligence and threat hunting in the most seamless, efficient manner. Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud is a prime example of a solution designed to unify global threat intelligence with an organization’s security operations, empowering both threat intel analysts and threat hunters on the same platform.

Pulling from a breadth of sources (including the open web, dark web, technical feeds, forums, malware repositories, and more), it delivers a holistic view of threats targeting organizations worldwide. All of this intelligence is continuously updated and made available in a searchable, contextualized form.

For a threat intelligence analyst, this means instant access to high-quality intel without hours of manual research. For a threat hunter, it means any IOC or clue they come across can be immediately enriched with crucial context, significantly speeding up investigations.
One of the biggest strengths a platform like this can have is seamless integration with the tools security teams already use. This means that threat intelligence isn’t locked in a separate silo but instead flows directly into day-to-day security workflows.

For example, through Recorded Future’s integrations, analysts can:

• See risk scores or threat labels next to each log event in a SIEM dashboard
• Enable automated hunting actions or incident response through SOAR integration
• Pivot from an indicator they’re investigating to see the wider intelligence context via powerful query capabilities and browser plug-ins

These integrations essentially transform threat intelligence and threat hunting into a sum greater than its parts. Practical use cases include:

• Alert enrichment and triage so threat hunters and incident responders can prioritize and scope appropriately
• Threat hunting “packages” that analysts can search against internally
• Integration with case management so that whether a threat hunter is documenting a new finding or an analyst is writing up an important report, it’s all connected
• Vulnerability hunting, which helps prioritize which weaknesses to hunt for signs of exploitation
• Automated threat hunting tools that automatically correlate and attribute intelligence across all your sources

Platforms like Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud essentially act as a force multiplier for security teams, combining the scale and speed of machine-driven intelligence with the human-led insight of threat hunting.

A Combined Approach for Resilient Security

Threat intelligence and threat hunting each cover vital ground in an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. Adopting a combined approach means fostering collaboration between intelligence analysts and threat hunters and equipping them with the tools and platforms that bridge their workflows to create that complementary feedback loop.

When done correctly, the line between threat intelligence and threat hunting blurs, with threat hunting becoming more intelligence-driven and intelligence becoming more action-oriented.

Ready to fortify your security program? Consider how Recorded Future’s Intelligence Cloud can help unite threat intelligence and threat hunting and operationalize that combined approach. Get started here.