Product Focus: The Power of Threat Intelligence

In the battle against sophisticated cyber adversaries, to gain the upper hand, defenders can no longer rely only on their ability to react but must develop a capability to predict where attackers will strike. With cyber criminals now effectively leveraging AI, 2025 has seen a significant reduction in breakout speeds and an increase in exploited vulnerabilities and identities. To combat this, correctly integrated Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) now must form the bedrock of the defensive strategy, transforming an organisation’s security posture from reactive to proactive. Its core applications include informing your defensive strategy by revealing the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of current threat actors, enriching security alerts to reduce false positives, allowing prioritised maintenance of security vulnerabilities and speeding up incident response. By understanding who is likely to attack you and how, you can prioritise patching, update your controls, and actively hunt for signs of intrusion before a major breach occurs. Without real-time, actionable CTI, even the most advanced detection tools are running blind. 

To frame how CTI can have business-saving impact consider these two examples:  

• A major bank was able to proactively build defences from a massive phishing campaign targeting its high-value customer base. Threat intelligence, specifically the analysis of dark web chatter and shared Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) across the financial sector, allowed the security team to identify the attacker’s infrastructure, including newly registered domains and command-and-control servers, before the malicious emails were even sent. This proactive knowledge allowed the bank to pre-emptively blacklist the domains and warn customers, thwarting the campaign entirely.  
• In another instance, a business using MS Windows on its endpoints, was able to discover and block an attacker who was aiming to exploit a Windows zero-day CVE(CVE-2023-36874). By analysing the threat actor’s behavioural TTPs and their attempt to escalate privileges on a client system, the security team was alerted to the unknown sequence of actions as highly malicious. The system automatically isolated the endpoint and leveraged its integrated intelligence to rapidly deploy a custom detection rule across all protected environments, stopping the novel attack before a patch was even available from the vendor. 

At Red Helix our cyber security managed service is founded on the CrowdStrike Falcon platform which is built with threat intelligence integrated into its very core. Falcon does more than just collect threat feeds, it collects data from endpoints, cloud workloads, and the global threat landscape and instantly fuses this with intelligence from the CrowdStrike Security Cloud. This core architecture provides a decisive advantage as every alert is immediately enriched with specific adversary context, enabling security teams to prioritise the threats that matter most. By baking threat intelligence into its DNA, Falcon ensures that your defence strategy is always one step ahead, seamlessly translating global knowledge into local, decisive protection.