Cyber threat intelligence is received from information sharing forums and sources.

Organization carries out threat intelligence by gathering information about information security threats related to its operations and how to protect against them. The goal is to increase awareness of the threat environment, so that own security level can be better evaluated and adequate control measures implemented.

When collecting threat intelligence, all three levels must be taken into account:

• strategic threat intelligence (e.g. information on the growing types of attackers and attacks)
• tactical threat intelligence (e.g. information about tools and technologies used in attacks)
• operational threat intelligence (e.g. details of specific attacks)

Principles related to threat intelligence should include:

• setting targets for threat intelligence
• identification, verification and selection of information sources used in threat intelligence
• gathering threat intelligence
• data processing for analysis (e.g. translation, formatting, compression)

The organization has defined policies that regularly collect up-to-date and reliable information about malware. Such can be e.g. mailing lists, magazines, blogs from security software vendors, or security news sites.

The purpose of the data sources is to verify the information on malware, to distinguish the scams from real malware and to ensure that the warnings received are truthful and informative.

The organization shall actively maintain contacts with stakeholders relevant to the organization's operations and other relevant actors related to the organization's operations and security.

The goal is especially to:

• increase knowledge of best practices and keep up to date with relevant security information
• ensure that organisation's understanding of the security environment is up-to-date and complete

Organization should share threat intelligence information actively with other organizations to improve its own threat awareness.