Integrating Threat Intelligence with SIEM for Better Security

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems have long been a mainstay of security operations centers. But how useful are they in a modern cybersecurity landscape? One where attackers roam throughout your online ecosystem, across your social networks, and in the shadows of the dark web, looking for vulnerabilities well outside traditional security perimeters?

Read on to explore how threat intelligence integration with SIEM can upgrade your security capabilities and empower you to identify and defeat threats before they cause significant damage. 

Understanding SIEM and Its Limitations

Traditional SIEM systems serve as central collection points for threat events from across your enterprise, providing a unified view of your security situation. They are helpful for capturing logs and correlating events from multiple systems, including intrusion detection devices, firewalls, internal security logs, and network monitoring tools. This centralized repository is intended to make it easier for security teams to recognize the patterns and anomalies that might indicate a security breach.

As ZeroFox Lead Product Manager Nelly Desmarattes explains, “From there, you can tag, categorize, and group all manner of events and incidents. So, instead of investigating each individual alert, you can mass-close non-relevant findings from all your different vendors. It's really about scaling up, operationalizing, automating, and aggregating all of that data to enable trend analysis.”

While SIEMs offer attractive features such as centralized log management and compliance reporting, they also come with an increasing number of disadvantages. Without proper filtering, SIEMs generate vast numbers of alerts, many of which are false positives, overwhelming security analysts and leading to alert fatigue. 

Additionally, SIEMs are primarily designed to identify known threats based on predefined rules and signatures, limiting their usefulness in proactive security planning. This reactive methodology means they are inadequate for gaining insights about adversary intent, less effective against new attack techniques, and poor at predicting future attack vectors. 

Nelly stresses, “Alert fatigue and false positives are real challenges. Added to that is the fact that SIEMs have limited context and analysis scope.”

Essentially, when you rely solely on SIEM technology, you're looking at your security environment with tunnel vision—the view is too restrictive to see the complete threat picture.

“That’s where ZeroFox stands out,” Nelly notes, ”we provide the detail, correlation, and context that you wouldn’t get by just consuming alert after alert.”

What is Threat Intelligence?

Threat Intelligence (TI), also called Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), involves the systematic collection and analysis of data on cyber adversaries and their activities, to help organizations understand and counter current and potential cybersecurity risks. By distilling raw data into actionable insights, TI enables organizations to enhance their cybersecurity measures to more effectively understand, identify, and respond to risks.

Nelly emphasizes the difference between traditional SIEM alerts and threat intelligence: “If you're just working from feeds, that's basically unorganized data. You're not getting any analysis—no human-led or contextual analysis that can connect different data sources, or add context to those alerts.”

The analysis process transforms enormous amounts of threat data into meaningful intelligence that security teams can use to make informed decisions. With credible threat intelligence, organizations can assess not just what threats exist, but which ones are most relevant to their specific industry, region, and technology stack. This rich context enables more targeted and efficient security operations.

Types of Threat Intelligence

To help enterprise organizations detect, identify, and mitigate digital risks, ZeroFox divides threat intelligence into the following three distinct categories, each serving different organizational needs:

1. Strategic Threat Intelligence: Provides high-level insight into the broader cyber threat landscape that impacts your organization over the long term. This intelligence helps executives and decision-makers understand emerging risks, anticipate what’s coming over the horizon, and adjust business strategies accordingly. Strategic intelligence primarily shapes C-suite planning and long-term security investments.
   
2. Tactical Threat Intelligence: Focuses on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) attackers use to infiltrate organizations. This knowledge enables SOC teams, threat hunters, and security architects to strengthen defenses, test security controls, and anticipate how adversaries might attempt to breach systems. Tactical intelligence provides the technical detail defenders need to prepare effective countermeasures.
   
3. Operational Threat Intelligence: Delivers real-time, actionable information about active campaigns and immediate threats. This includes indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as malicious domains, malware hashes, or phishing email subjects. Operational intelligence is consumed by SOC managers, analysts, and incident responders, who use it to detect, mitigate, and respond to threats as they unfold.

Why Integrate Threat Intelligence with SIEM?

Integrating threat intelligence with SIEM transforms your security operations by combining internal log data with external context. Here’s how:

Enhanced Threat Detection

With threat intelligence integration, your SIEM is better prepared to recognize emerging threats before they reach your network. By comparing internal event data with external threat intelligence, security teams gain broader awareness and the ability to identify patterns and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed, providing greater protection than traditional rule-based alerting.

For example, a series of seemingly innocent login attempts might not trigger alerts on their own, but when correlated with threat intelligence about current attack patterns, they could reveal an attempted breach. 

Improved Alert Prioritization

A typical SIEM system can generate thousands of alerts daily, overwhelming security analysts and making it difficult to separate genuine threats from noise.

Nelly explains how SIEM threat intelligence helps reduce this alert fatigue by enriching warnings with relevant context about threats: “One of the benefits of using ZeroFox specifically is that you have the alerts feeding into the SIEM, but you also have the threat intelligence module within ZeroFox that can give you more detail and provide correlations you wouldn’t get if you’re just consuming alert after alert.”

Instead of simply flagging suspicious activity, threat intelligence integration with SIEM can provide valuable information about the threat actor, their typical targets, and the potential impact of a successful attack. This contextual analysis enables security teams to assign risk scores based on threat severity and relevance to your organization, allowing you to allocate limited resources to the most critical issues first.

Faster Incident Response

When security incidents occur, the longer a threat remains unaddressed, the more damage it can cause. With access to SIEM threat intelligence, security analysts can rapidly determine the nature and scope of an incident, identify potentially affected systems, and implement targeted countermeasures. Instead of starting from scratch with each new case, teams can leverage established knowledge about similar attacks, including accessing tried and tested solutions. This intelligence-driven approach significantly reduces mean time to respond (MTTR) and limits the potential impact of security breaches.

Proactive Security Posture

Perhaps most importantly, threat intelligence integration with SIEM means that instead of waiting for attacks to occur and only then responding, your security teams can anticipate threats and strengthen defenses accordingly.

For example, if threat intelligence reveals a new vulnerability being exploited in your industry, you can prioritize patching that vulnerability long before seeing exploitation attempts in your environment. This forward-looking approach allows security teams to focus vulnerability management efforts on the most pressing risks, rather than trying to address all vulnerabilities equally.

Nelly outlines another use case: “When your systems spot a suspicious file, say on an employee’s laptop, you can check if the file is malicious using our data.” 

“But not only that, you can also see if it’s associated with threat actors, such as ransomware groups, or with other tactics used against your industry. You can branch out from there, starting with whether the file is malicious and then doing a full analysis,” she explains.

“ZeroFox is definitely more proactive than other solutions, providing the ability to do additional threat hunting.”

“You can use our intelligence search to visually look for associations and correlations between different data sets. If you click on one thing, you can pivot and search for more, doing a deep dive into whatever subject you’re investigating. That’s an additional component you just wouldn’t get with any other system.”

ZeroFox Threat Intelligence Integration with SIEM

The ZeroFox approach to enhancing your existing SIEM system with threat intelligence combines advanced data collection, expert analysis, and seamless integration capabilities to deliver actionable intelligence directly to your security infrastructure. Here’s how ZeroFox enables your security teams to maximize the value of both technologies:

ZeroFox Threat Intelligence Feeds

Derived from ZeroFox's extensive global intelligence collection network and purpose-built to address specific security challenges, ZeroFox Threat Intelligence Feeds can be easily integrated with your security infrastructure through pre-built connectors. ZeroFox feeds include:

Identity & Fraud Intelligence

This feed helps protect against account compromise, customer fraud, and PII exposures. Identity & Fraud Intelligence contains critical information about compromised credentials, credit card information, and breach data that can be used to detect and prevent unauthorized access attempts. Organizations can integrate the data with identity management systems to trigger automatic password resets when credentials are compromised.

Network & Vulnerability Intelligence

For network security teams, the Network & Vulnerability Intelligence feed provides critical data to defend against intrusions and hijacked systems. Including botnet data, malware signatures, and exploit information, this feed helps identify and block malicious network traffic. When integrated with a SIEM, the intelligence enables rapid detection of known malicious IP addresses and domains attempting to communicate with internal systems.

Deep & Dark Web Intelligence

The Deep & Dark Web Intelligence feed delivers unique visibility into the covert communications channels where threat actors plan attacks. Intelligence is gathered from dark web forums, Telegram, Discord, and other hidden platforms where cybercriminals share information and coordinate activities. The feed provides early warning of potential targeted attacks and data breaches, allowing organizations to strengthen defenses before attacks materialize.

OnWatch Expert Managed Services

Beyond intelligence feeds, ZeroFox offers OnWatch Expert services that provide dedicated threat intelligence analysts with specialized skills and knowledge that complement both your existing security operations and automated intelligence systems, ensuring that your SIEM is being fed properly vetted, relevant threat data.

ZeroFox analysts validate and enrich alerts from your SIEM, reducing false positives and adding valuable context to genuine security incidents. Their expertise helps security teams understand the significance of detected threats and prioritize response efforts accordingly. 

As Nelly points out, “You might get alerts saying you’re mentioned on the dark web, for instance, but we can give you essential context—what is that forum about, who is the threat actor, is this a credible threat?”

Of course, understanding a threat is only the first step, you also need to eliminate it.

“If you need additional services such as takedowns , we have a team for that. It’s that extra analysis and remediation you wouldn’t get from just any other provider.”

Additionally, OnWatch analysts produce regular threat intelligence reports tailored to your industry and organization, keeping your security team informed about relevant threats and attack trends.

“Large cohorts of our customers—especially in financial services—use our data and analysis to combat payment card fraud,” explains Nelly. 

“We get a lot of data regarding leaked payment card information, and customers use that not just in their SIEM but also in their fraud systems. They can identify compromised cards, investigate, close out, and reissue cards, and look for fraudulent purchases.”

“We provide additional value with dark web alerts about threat actors’ activities—how they’re targeting banks, for example. If we were just supplying a data dump of compromised cards, our customers would miss out on the threat analysis that helps them understand how to make themselves more secure.”

Best Practices for SIEM and Threat Intelligence Integration

Successfully implementing SIEM threat intelligence requires careful planning and execution. Here are ZeroFox’s key best practices to ensure successful integration:

1. Define Clear Intelligence Requirements

Different organizations face particular threats—financial services companies may be primarily concerned with fraud and account takeover, while manufacturing firms might focus more on intellectual property theft or operational disruption. Understanding these industry-specific threats helps focus intelligence collection efforts on relevant information. Before integrating threat intelligence, identify what intelligence you need based on:

• Your organization's specific threat profile
• Critical assets requiring protection
• Industry-specific threats and regulations
• Key stakeholders and their intelligence needs

ZeroFox can help develop or review intelligence requirements to ensure they focus on protecting your most critical assets from relevant threats.

2. Filter and Validate Intelligence

Quality is more precious than quantity when it comes to threat intelligence. Rather than overwhelming your SIEM with unvalidated threat data, instead:

• Use ZeroFox's platform to filter out irrelevant or low-confidence indicators
• Focus on high-fidelity intelligence relevant to your environment
• Implement ingestion rules to optimize intelligence feeds

3. Establish Bidirectional Data Flow

Effective integration of threat intelligence and SIEM requires more than just funneling data in one direction. Create a feedback loop between your SIEM and threat intelligence platform:

• Send validated intelligence to your SIEM for alerting
• Return SIEM events to your threat intelligence platform for correlation and enrichment
• Use this cycle to continuously refine and improve detection rules

4. Leverage Automation and Orchestration

Manual threat intelligence processes are time-consuming and difficult to scale. Automate threat intelligence workflows to maximize efficiency:

• Set up automated actions based on specific threat indicators
• Create playbooks for common incident response scenarios
• Use ZeroFox's platform to orchestrate responses across your security infrastructure

5. Measure and Optimize

Regularly assessing the effectiveness of your integrated threat intelligence is crucial for continuous improvement, so be sure to:

• Track which intelligence sources produce actionable alerts
• Measure reduction in false positives
• Monitor improvements in detection and response times

Regular optimization based on these measurements ensures that your threat intelligence program continues to meet evolving security needs.

Security Teams Enhanced by SIEM and Threat Intelligence

From frontline analysts to executive leadership, different security teams benefit from integrated threat intelligence in unique ways. Understanding these varied use cases helps you maximize the value of your threat intelligence investments:

SOC Analysts

SOC analysts can leverage threat intelligence in their SIEM to:

• Quickly correlate alerts with known malicious indicators
• Identify compromised systems based on threat intelligence matches
• Prioritize alerts based on threat severity and relevance

Incident Responders

Incident response teams benefit from:

• Contextual information about attackers and their techniques
• Insights into attacker infrastructure and potential targets
• Ability to predict attacker next steps based on known patterns
• Better informed remediation strategy development

Security Leadership

CISOs and security managers gain:

• Strategic insights to inform security investments
• Comprehensive visibility into the threat landscape affecting their organization
• Data-driven metrics to demonstrate security program effectiveness

Protect Your Organization Beyond the Perimeter with ZeroFox

Today's threat actors don't respect traditional boundaries—attacks can originate anywhere and target any aspect of your online presence, requiring a broader perspective that encompasses your entire digital footprint. Integrating threat intelligence with your SIEM is a significant step toward achieving comprehensive security that extends far beyond your network perimeter. With ZeroFox, you gain visibility into threats across social media, surface, deep, and dark web—areas traditional security tools can't see or protect.

ZeroFox’s platform extends your SIEM’s visibility beyond the network perimeter, protecting against threats on social media, the dark web, and public attack surfaces. By integrating ZeroFox’s AI-driven intelligence and expert services, you can:

• Reduce alert fatigue by up to 80% with validated intelligence.
• Accelerate response times by up to 40% with automated workflows.
• Shift to proactive threat-informed defense with 360° visibility.

Learn how ZeroFox transforms your SIEM into a security powerhouse. Contact ZeroFox today to learn how our threat intelligence solutions can transform your SIEM from a simple logging tool into a proactive security powerhouse, protecting your organization across its entire digital presence.