Cyberattacks are growing in number, complexity, and impact and for Australian businesses, this means cybersecurity is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. However, traditional reactive measures are no longer enough. Security teams need to understand who is targeting them, how those attacks are unfolding, and what they can do to stay ahead.
That’s where Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) becomes essential. Infotrust CTI is not just a buzzword it’s embedded across our Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services and our 24x7 Security Operations Centre (SOC), helping our clients detect, respond, and anticipate cyber threats in real time.
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is the process of collecting, analysing, and disseminating data on cyber threats, adversaries, and attack tools, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to enhance an organisation's security posture. Raw data is gathered from multiple sources, such as threat feeds, dark web forums, and internal security logs, and transformed into actionable insights that enable businesses to anticipate, detect, and respond to cyber risks before damage is done.
For example, CTI can help identify that a specific ransomware group is actively targeting organisations in your industry, using a known phishing method to gain access to internal systems. With this intelligence, your team can proactively strengthen email defences, brief staff on what to look out for, and update detection rules.
According to the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), over 87,000 cybercrime incidents were reported in 2023–24 that's one every six minutes. The volume, sophistication, and speed of modern cyberattacks demand more than just prevention — they require anticipation.
The Infotrust SOC leverages threat intelligence in real time to reduce noise, improve detection fidelity, and enrich investigations ensuring clients receive the right alerts, at the right time, with meaningful context.
Threat intelligence uses various sources of information to give businesses insights into past, current, and potential future cyber threats. Data includes Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), observable data points that indicate malicious activity, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), describing the specific methods used by attackers, and Threat Actor Profiles, which help organisations understand specific groups or individuals.
A well-rounded threat intelligence program includes elements from all three levels to meet an organisation's unique security needs and help solve real-world challenges.
Infotrust’s SOC observed a spike in suspicious email activity targeting clients in the professional services and education sectors. These emails contained malicious links disguised as DocuSign requests and were sent from domains recently registered in Eastern Europe.
Through our threat intelligence feeds, we correlated these indicators with activity from a known threat actor group linked to recent ransomware attacks across ANZ. This actor was actively exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a popular PDF rendering tool used by many enterprise document systems.
Within 12 hours, we had prevented further spread across three client environments, updated detection content across the SOC, and briefed all impacted sectors in our monthly threat bulletin.
Without CTI, this campaign might have slipped through until endpoint detection caught the post-compromise behaviour potentially too late. By fusing threat intel directly into our SOC operations, we protected clients proactively and maintained business continuity.
However, leveraging high-quality threat intelligence also presents challenges. CTI teams have to deal with large volumes of data, differentiate between normal and malicious activity and determine which information is relevant to their organisation, without becoming overwhelmed or distracted by noise. And those decisions can only be made if the threat intelligence is accurate and timely. There's also compliance to bear in mind; threat intelligence systems often handle sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII) and must comply with data protection regulations.
Fortunately, these challenges can be mitigated by implementing the right systems and processes, whether that's investing in high-quality CTI platforms, ensuring teams are trained to analyse and apply insights correctly, or building integrations that automatically surface relevant intelligence. With the right approach, organisations can save time, respond more effectively, and gain greater peace of mind.
In a rapidly evolving cyber landscape, Cyber Threat Intelligence enables modern businesses to move from a reactive stance to a proactive security posture, anticipating attacks before they escalate and responding with speed and precision.
To make CTI work for your organisation, the first step is to assess your current security strategy and identify where intelligence can enhance decision-making, response times, and resource allocation. From tactical data to strategic insight, effective CTI should be tailored to your organisation's risk profile, industry threats, and operational goals.
The value is clear: better protection, faster responses, stronger compliance, and increased resilience. If you're looking to understand how CTI can be integrated into your cyber security approach, reach out to the team at Infotrust for a personalised consultation.
