Data Rich, Insight Poor: The Hard Truth About Your Threat Intelligence Strategy

The Intelligence Paradox

Organizations are drowning in threat intelligence (TI) data — hashes, IPs, and threat actor profiles — yet security incidents are on the rise. 

The problem isn’t a lack of information. It’s that more data doesn’t automatically translate to better security.

Access to threat data alone doesn’t reveal whether adversaries are in the environment or explain what they’re doing there. Without context, threat intelligence is a strategy without a signal. 

The Current State of Threat Intelligence: The “Mugshot” Phase

At its core, standard threat intelligence consists of global feeds, indicators of compromise (IoCs), and signatures. These datasets act as a library of known threats, flagging specific hashes, domains, and IP addresses.

However, most threat intelligence is retrospective, documenting what happened to another organization in previous attacks. It tells security teams what an adversary did to an organization yesterday, not what they’re doing to the environment right now.

Without network intelligence, a “bad IP” warning is unactionable; it lacks context. Such indicators are useless without confirmation that internal servers contacted it, and knowing whether the exchange was 5 bytes or 5 gigabytes.

Alone, intelligence feeds cannot confirm if an organization’s internal servers communicated with a threat. With a traditional threat intelligence approach, organizations get the “mugshots” (threat intelligence) with which to identify a potential suspect, but lack the “CCTV footage” (the network) to prove that the threat actors are inside the building.

Network Insights Provide “CCTV” Footage

To understand what’s really happening, organizations need to correlate external threat indicators with the ground truth — the network.

The network is the only medium that adversaries cannot evade. Host-based artifacts can be manipulated and logs can be deleted. However, the network provides an immutable record of behavior that’s independent of the endpoint. Every connection, every byte transferred, every protocol exchange leaves a trace.

This capability serves as the analytical layer that cross-references external threat feeds against real-time internal activity. Teams then move beyond “what’s known” to “what is actually occurring,” creating actionable forensics. Questions shift from ‘is this real?’ to ‘here’s the scope’ and investigation time shrinks from hours to minutes.

Learn more about how ExtraHop can take threat intelligence to the next level and then explore our Global Threat Landscape Report to see the latest trends in attacker behavior.