What is threat intelligence and how does it improve security operations?

Threat intelligence is evidence-based information about existing or emerging threats that helps organizations make informed security decisions. It comes in three levels: strategic intelligence provides high-level trends for executives, tactical intelligence provides attacker techniques and procedures for security teams, and operational intelligence provides specific indicators of compromise like malicious IP addresses, domain names, and file hashes for automated detection. Threat intelligence feeds integrate into SIEMs, firewalls, and endpoint tools to automatically detect known threats.