Here's the first major challenge every security team is facing today: The vast majority of attacks don't start at your network perimeter. They begin in external third-party places you can't easily see and don't directly control.
Even organizations that invest millions in cybersecurity remain blind to what's happening beyond their firewall if they rely on traditional security tools designed to protect internal networks. With no visibility into these outside threats, they're perpetually reactive, always scrambling to respond to attacks that could have been anticipated and prevented.
Breaking Down a Facebook Heist
The True Citrus team had worked hard for months to attract 80,000 Facebook followers until a single message almost destroyed it all.
Lindsey Paolucci, the Digital Marketing Manager, received a direct message from "Mollie Burke," supposedly a Facebook agent, warning that suspicious activity on their True Lemon page required an immediate password update. Paolucci clicked the shortened link, typed her credentials into a login page, and hit submit.
Minutes later, the CMO's phone buzzed with a message saying Facebook had removed her as admin. Then the marketing manager got the same notice. They watched, helpless, as their page transformed before their eyes. The profile picture changed, the cover photo vanished, and "True Lemon" became "True Video 4 Fun +18."
Every fifteen minutes, like clockwork, malicious links invaded their followers' feeds. Phone lines and inboxes were soon flooded by angry and confused customers. Three thousand people unfollowed the brand within hours.
Looking for a solution, True Citrus were advised to find a threat intelligence provider. They contacted ZeroFox, who restored True Citrus’ admin access within twenty-four hours.
After recovering from the account takeover attempt (ATO), True Citrus partnered with ZeroFox. Within minutes of the engagement, ZeroFox discovered and removed a fake account impersonating the brand.
Despite robust internal security, without a threat intelligence provider, True Citrus had no insights into fake social media agents targeting their employees, no warning system to flag the impersonation, and no automated response to block attacks they couldn't see coming.
“We had no idea that things like this happened so frequently,” Paolucci says.
“ZeroFox would have stopped [the malicious actor] from reaching out to me in the first place, so of course we wish we had this in place before the attack!”
This type of account takeover attack can do serious damage if left unchecked, but external vulnerabilities come in many forms. From Telegram scams to criminal Tor forums, bad actors can leverage your brand across platforms you may not even know exist.
And here’s the second major problem for security teams: the threat landscape evolves faster than traditional defenses can adapt.
Three-quarters of security professionals report increased phishing attacks, with 85 percent attributing this rise to adversaries using large language models. Threat actors wielding generative AI have slashed phishing costs by 95 percent while maintaining or improving their success rates. Every 11 seconds, another organization falls victim to ransomware, with incidents surging 15 percent year over year and North American organizations now bearing 62 percent of worldwide digital extortion activity. Cybercrime as a whole is set to strip $12 trillion from the global economy by the end of 2025.
Beyond devastating financial losses, such attacks also erode customer trust, harm reputations, and open businesses up to legal liability. Yet a third of organizations defend themselves on an ad-hoc basis, only responding to threats as they emerge instead of trying to prevent them in the first place. To survive and succeed in this environment requires a more sophisticated approach to security.
Read on to discover how to choose a threat intelligence provider that will shift your defenses from reactive to predictive by catching the fake profiles, spoofed domains, and AI-generated lures before the next “Mollie Burke” reaches your employees or your customers.
Three Types of Threat Intelligence
Before you can judge which provider will best serve your organization, you need to know what kind of intelligence you’re actually shopping for. Effective threat intelligence is a structured process to enable faster, better informed decision-making that mitigates vulnerabilities. It involves analyzing data from various sources to help organizations anticipate cyberattacks, provides actionable insights on attacker tactics, and recommends defense strategies and security responses.
Threat intelligence is delivered in three distinct forms, each with a specific purpose and aimed at a different audience:
- Strategic Intelligence helps executives and board members understand the threat landscape and arrive at accurate conclusions. This includes insights on industry trends, geopolitical risks, and emerging threats that could impact your organization's strategic direction. Strategic intelligence answers questions about long-term risks, regulatory changes, and how threats might affect your business over the coming quarters and years.
- Operational Intelligence provides the "who, what, why, when, and how" of threats targeting your organization. This intelligence helps security teams understand threat actor motivations, tactics, and likely targets within your infrastructure. It bridges the gap between high-level strategy and ground-level tactics, enabling teams to anticipate attack patterns and adjust defenses accordingly.
- Tactical Intelligence delivers the technical indicators—IP addresses, domain names, file hashes—that your security tools need to automatically detect and block threats. This is the most granular level, providing the specific signatures and patterns that enable immediate defensive action.
You need all three levels working together to grow and prosper. Strategic intelligence without tactical indicators leaves you aware but unable to act. Tactical indicators without strategic context create noise without understanding. A comprehensive threat intelligence provider delivers all three levels, enabling different teams across your organization to make more accurate decisions.
How to Choose a Threat Intelligence Provider: Top 6 Mistakes to Avoid
When organizations realize they're blind to external threats, the natural reaction is to find a solution as quickly as possible. But teams that rush into buying threat intelligence repeat the same mistakes over and over, burning through budget and time while leaving themselves just as vulnerable as before. Let's examine what typically goes wrong and why:
1. Ignoring Your External Digital Footprint
The first mistake is focusing exclusively on securing your traditional IT infrastructure while ignoring your external footprint. Today’s bad actors often target external assets first—social media accounts, brand reputation, executive personas—using them to gather intelligence for later attacks or as a way to directly harm your business. Your firewall can't see or stop these threats.
2. Not Defining Your Intelligence Requirements
Businesses often start shopping for vendors before defining their needs. Only half of organizations have formally documented their intelligence requirements, according to the SANS Institute's CTI Survey. This initial failure cascades into wasted resources as teams buy solutions that leave them chasing irrelevant threats while missing genuine risks.
3. Seeking Complete Threat Coverage
Another typical mistake is believing you must ensure complete coverage of every possible threat.
"Too often organizations think they need a threat intelligence provider who captures every last signal on the planet," Josh Mayfield, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at ZeroFox, says.
"Of course, that’s not possible, so they compromise from there, looking for who can get close to that. But that's still an ill-formed requirement. Somebody may have comprehensive knowledge of the most insanely dangerous libraries on a Tor channel they've infiltrated, but none of it may be relevant to you."
4. Purchasing Raw Data
Raw data overwhelms teams instead of providing actionable insights. Without context and analysis, you end up drowning in noise and neglecting realistic threats. You need intelligence that explains not just what's happening, but why it matters and what you should do about it.
5. Poor Integration Planning
Organizations often end up buying powerful platforms that can’t connect to their existing tools, leaving intelligence unused and teams frustrated. Verify integration capabilities before purchase and plan implementation during evaluation, not after.
6. Undervaluing Human Expertise in Threat Analysis
While automation is perfect for gathering a vast volume of external threats, only humans provide the nuanced context that transforms observations into understanding. Organizations relying purely on automated feeds miss subtle, targeted threats that require human insight to detect and interpret.
5 Key Criteria for How to Choose a Threat Intelligence Provider
As mentioned earlier, to select the right platform, the ideal approach starts with you. What are your domains? What's your brand? What are your people's identities? Once you’ve developed your Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) you can look for intelligence tailored to protect those specific assets. Plus, avoid the common pitfalls that derail many threat intelligence programs.
1. Identify Your Organization's Requirements
Begin by mapping your complete digital footprint through attack surface visualization. This process brings all your known properties together but also reveals forgotten assets like marketing microsites from years past still running vulnerable code, subdomains registered by former employees now hosting malware, or executive profiles revealing travel schedules to threat actors.
Next, honestly assess your current capabilities. Identify what intelligence you already collect, how you process it, and where gaps exist. Consider the needs of departments beyond the traditional security operations center (SOC). For example, your SOC might need to know which IP addresses attacked competitors this week. Meanwhile, executives need to understand how attack trends affect strategic plans. And legal teams must know whether you're meeting compliance requirements.
Mayfield emphasizes the importance of beginning with your organization's specific needs rather than generic threat intelligence: "Many providers start with the threat, trying to find the juicy, the cool, the interesting, and then try to figure out a way it's relevant to you. They get malware myopia, and what comes out is some generalized academic, sandboxed environment teardown of something you're never going to see."
Every capability, every feature, every demonstration should map directly to your identified needs. If a vendor pitches you services that don't address your requirements, question whether they understand your business.
2. Compare Collection Capabilities and Coverage
Collection capabilities are not simply a checklist of sources; they are the deliberate, risk-based choices a provider makes about which corners of the internet, dark web, and underground ecosystems they will continuously monitor on your behalf.
"You need to know what a provider's priority is," Mayfield advises. "It can't be the priority of finding more channels out there to hack into and siphon. It needs to be you: Where are you on the Internet? How can I keep you safe?"
Each of these domains present unique challenges and opportunities for your brand:
- Surface web monitoring encompasses the visible internet, which generates staggering data volumes. Twitter alone produces six thousand posts every second—over five hundred million daily—yet this represents just one channel among thousands requiring monitoring. Beyond social media, effective providers must monitor news sites, blogs, forums, paste sites, and code repositories where threat actors share tools and discuss targets. The challenge lies in filtering this massive noise to find relevant signals without missing critical threats.
- The deep web, which includes everything not indexed by search engines, dwarfs the surface web in size. Password-protected databases, private forums, and CAPTCHA-protected sites often contain early warning indicators: security researchers discussing zero-day vulnerabilities, industry databases revealing supply chain compromises, or private paste sites hosting stolen data. Access to these sources provides crucial lead time for defense.
- Dark web intelligence focuses on criminal marketplaces and forums accessible only through special encryption protocols. While representing a small portion of internet content, these hidden spaces spawn many of the most dangerous organizational threats. Your provider should maintain embedded operatives who've cultivated personas and relationships within these communities over years, enabling direct engagement with threat actors and early warning of planned attacks.
Beyond breadth of coverage, consider collection velocity and accuracy. Every second counts when defending against external threats. Your provider must be able to deliver near real-time updates as threats emerge, but speed without precision creates its own problems. Providers that generate false positives waste valuable time and resources that should be focused on genuine threats.
Platform agility matters as the threat landscape develops. New criminal forums emerge as law enforcement shuts down established marketplaces, and threat actors migrate to new platforms when their preferred channels come under scrutiny. Your provider should already be monitoring emerging platforms before threats materialize there.
Language capabilities often determine whether you catch threats early or miss them entirely. For instance, Russian-speaking forums might host sophisticated ransomware groups, while Mandarin channels reveal nation-state campaigns and intellectual property theft. Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic sources may expose regional threats that English-only monitoring would miss completely. Ensure your provider has native speakers, not just translation software.
3. Evaluate Analysis and Intelligence Processing
Many organizations mistakenly believe that more data equals better security, but excessive, irrelevant information actually obscures important signals and overloads security teams. Knowing how providers transform data into actionable intelligence tells you whether you'll receive genuine value or expensive noise.
"Threat intelligence hinges on three things: observation, implication, opportunity," Mayfield explains. "Most threat intelligence stops at observation. They tell you what they observed, and then you're left to figure out the implication, and if you get that right, hopefully you can figure out what your opportunity is. That's where most threat intelligence fails—it's inert because it's not even active in the first place."
For example, analysis can provide the context to reveal that a particular IP belongs to infrastructure controlled by a ransomware group known for targeting your industry, that it appeared in recent attacks against your competitors, or that it's part of a broader campaign following predictable patterns. Such context enables you to anticipate the next phase and prevent it, rather than simply blocking one indicator among thousands.
Quality intelligence provides both technical and business implications. The best platforms don't simply report that malware exists; they explain how it works, who created it, why they're using it, and what they hope to achieve. They assess the likelihood of your organization being targeted, recommend specific defensive measures tailored to your environment, and provide clear guidance on remediation.
Human expertise remains irreplaceable for this sophisticated analysis. While automation enables data collection at internet scales, professional analysts use their knowledge and experience to provide nuanced understanding and strategic insights. They correlate seemingly unrelated indicators to identify complex campaigns, validating and triaging alerts as necessary.
This human element proves especially useful for negotiating closed communities. Dark web forums often require proof of criminal activity to join, with established members quickly identifying and expelling suspected researchers. The most successful threat intelligence providers maintain operatives with carefully cultivated personas built over years, enabling genuine engagement with threat actors and access to intelligence unavailable through technical means alone.
4. Audit Integration and Delivery Mechanisms
Given the volume of threats organizations face, for intelligence to deliver maximum value, it must arrive in formats your tools can process automatically without manual effort and integrate seamlessly with your existing security infrastructure. Intelligence flowing directly into your SIEM enriches alerts with vital context for investigations, while integration with your SOAR platform enables automated threat response based on fresh insights.
APIs enable this integration, but the quality varies significantly. Evaluate the completeness of the vendor’s documentation, their provision of SDKs for common programming languages, and their track record maintaining stable interfaces over time. Industry standards like STIX and TAXII provide structured formats for sharing threat intelligence, but verify your provider's implementation actually works with your tools.
Also, consider how the vendor handles updates to their intelligence. Real-time streaming feeds address different needs than periodic batch updates, and an ability to query intelligence programmatically supports investigation workflows. Look for clear processes for handling false positives and intelligence retractions to prevent automation from becoming a liability.
Similarly, delivery mechanisms must match consumer needs. While security analysts require technical indicators delivered through automated feeds, executives need strategic intelligence presented in business-focused reports, and incident responders benefit from on-demand access to contextual information during active investigations. Quality providers offer multiple delivery channels tailored to these different audiences, rather than forcing everyone into the same interface.
Plan your integration carefully to avoid disrupting operations. Start with a pilot program focused on your highest-priority requirements. Establish clear success metrics before implementation begins. Document lessons learned and adjust your approach as you expand the program. This measured approach ensures intelligence enhances rather than complicates your security operations.
5. Prove Value Before Purchase
Examine how platforms perform under the pressure of your actual threat landscape, within your unique operational constraints, and against your specific security objectives.
The following framework provides essential principles for cutting through vendor marketing to identify solutions that deliver genuine operational value.
- Vet the Vendor: Test the vendor's expertise directly through their responses to your questions. Do they understand your industry's unique threats? Can they explain their collection methods transparently? Do they acknowledge limitations honestly or claim impossible completeness? Their answers reveal whether they'll be a true partner or merely a data provider.
- Get Real-World Proof: Don't evaluate platforms in abstract demonstrations—request proof of concept implementations focused on your highest-priority use cases, and test them against your actual threats and workflows. During evaluation, measure mean time to detect genuine threats versus false positives. Track how much analyst time the platform saves versus creates. Document whether intelligence integrates smoothly or requires manual intervention.
- Price the Full Lifecycle: Evaluate total cost beyond licensing fees. Factor in integration expenses, training requirements, and ongoing analyst time needed to operationalize intelligence. A less expensive platform that requires dedicated staff for manual processing may cost more than a comprehensive solution that automates routine tasks while providing expert human analysis for complex threats.
- Demand Peer Review: Request customer references from organizations similar to yours—not just in industry but in size, structure, and security maturity. Ask specific questions about implementation challenges, time to value, and ongoing support quality. Learn what they wish they'd known before purchasing.
- Buy Into Their Roadmap: Consider the vendor's trajectory alongside their current capabilities. Threat intelligence requires continuous evolution as the threat landscape changes. Evaluate their track record of innovation, frequency of platform updates, and responsiveness to emerging threats. A provider perfect today, but stagnant tomorrow, becomes a liability rather than an asset.
How to Choose a Threat Intelligence Provider in the Current Landscape
Your choice of threat intelligence provider will shape your security posture for years. Make sure it’s based on clear requirements, thorough evaluation, and proven capability rather than promises and presentations.
Being familiar with the diverse approaches in the threat intelligence market helps you evaluate the benefits and tradeoffs of different vendors, and understand why many organizations struggle with their current threat intelligence. Most platforms either overwhelm teams with unfiltered data, restrict protection to narrow use cases, or rely too heavily on automation without the human expertise needed for accuracy and context.
There are academic-type providers like Recorded Future that excel at deep threat research. "If you want to know the shoe size of an APT coming out of Tehran, they're great," notes Mayfield.
However, this scholarly breadth often comes at the expense of practical application. Without sufficient human analysts to interpret context, customers face data overload, noisy alerts, and false positives, meaning that customers lacking their own internal resources find such platforms difficult to operationalize. With disruption services outsourced to third parties, their response and remediation capabilities are also reported to be weak and expensive.
Meanwhile, AI-centric vendors like Bolster promise automation and scale but face inherent limitations. Their models rely on pre-trained data that may be months old, unable to adapt to new scenarios until the next training cycle. Coverage often focuses narrowly on specific use cases like phishing detection and domain monitoring, creating dangerous blind spots when threats emerge from unexpected vectors. While delivering fast automated responses for simple threats, limited human oversight leads to inconsistent results for complex issues requiring deeper understanding.
Legacy providers like Netcraft should have decades of experience, but somehow still fall short in terms of agility and accuracy. They lean heavily on automation—performing 80-90% of takedowns without human oversight—but this means they sacrifice precision for speed, frequently producing false positives and causing the take-down of legitimate sites. These platforms may also lack modern features like attack-type reporting or severity analysis that security teams need to prioritize responses and integrate intelligence into existing workflows.
Sensor-dependent providers like CrowdStrike derive intelligence from their deployed endpoints. While this provides visibility into attacks targeting their customers, it inherently limits scope. “They're constrained by what they can extract from their sensors. It can't be proactive because it's inert on the device where its sensor is located. It can't go out and find threats for you," Mayfield observes.
What all these providers are missing is that it’s not enough to merely detect threats and attempt automatic takedowns, you must also contextualize, prioritize, and disrupt them in a way that aligns directly with each customer’s unique digital footprint. This is where ZeroFox shines above the rest.
Why Organizations Choose ZeroFox
While other providers load up with threats and try to make them relevant, ZeroFox sets itself apart by starting with what matters most–you. By first understanding your organization's unique digital identity, assets, and requirements, the ZeroFox team can build intelligence specifically tailored to protect what you value most. This client-first approach ensures every alert, every report, and every recommendation directly addresses your actual risks rather than theoretical possibilities.
Let’s take a closer look at how ZeroFox puts you into a proactive security stance.
Action-Oriented Intelligence
ZeroFox follows the OIO principle—Observation, Implication, Opportunity—meaning threats are not just detected, but immediately acted upon. When a critical risk is identified, such as executive impersonation, clients don’t merely get notified of the danger; they receive confirmation that decisive remediation actions—takedowns or blocking—have already occurred. This philosophy helps ZeroFox neutralize over 800,000 threats weekly across more than 100 networks, granting organizations a dynamic advantage over adversaries.
Unmatched Scale and Comprehensive Coverage
ZeroFox’s reach extends across the surface, deep, and dark web, as well as social media and mobile app stores, ensuring wide-ranging visibility against both mainstream and emerging threat vectors. It protects over 4 million assets and scans 65 million domains daily, supported by constant analysis of more than 1000 dark web forums.
Elite Human Expertise and AI Synergy
ZeroFox leverages over 100 threat analysts—including embedded operatives within criminal forums—who manage established personas for real-time intelligence gathering. This depth of human expertise, paired with advanced AI, delivers finished intelligence in over 27 languages, providing contextual, actionable insights customized to each organization’s specific threat landscape. The platform also maintains a unique archive of threat data, empowering pattern recognition and providing a strategic advantage in response planning.
Effortless Integration and Comprehensive Services
Seamless interoperability with existing SIEM, SOAR, and TIP platforms ensures ZeroFox augments, rather than undermines, existing enterprise security infrastructure. For organizations wanting full operational coverage, 24/7/365 managed OnWatch services transfer the burden from internal teams to dedicated experts. Strategic alliances—such as with Google Cloud for anti-phishing—enable ZeroFox to block malicious domains across 5 billion global devices in under 15 minutes.
Measured, Recognized Impact
Unlike competing threat intelligence providers, ZeroFox’s business value is quantifiable. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study shows customers typically realize a 267% ROI, thanks to benefits such as preempting executive impersonation losses (averaging $44,000 per incident), automating takedowns that save hundreds of thousands in labor, and preserving revenue streams through fast remediation. Compared to competitors managing a few thousand takedowns annually, ZeroFox delivers over 1 million successful threat disruptions yearly. Its trusted standing is reinforced by partnerships with four Fortune 10 companies and consistent recognition from Gartner, Forrester, and Frost & Sullivan.
Benefits That Set ZeroFox Apart:
- Client-First Model: Intelligence starts with the customer’s assets, driving customized protection.
- Proactive Disruption: Threats neutralized before the notification reaches clients, shrinking response times and exposure windows.
- Global Scale: Millions of assets, domains, and URLs monitored continuously.
- Full-Spectrum Visibility: Across web, social, mobile, and exclusive dark web forums.
- Human + AI Excellence: Over 100 analysts, embedded operatives, and years of historical threat patterns inform every action.
- Integration and Flexibility: Modular architecture works with any security stack, easing adoption.
- 24/7 Managed Support: OnWatch services deliver always-on monitoring and intervention.
- Industry Validation: Partnership with Google, 50+ disruptor partners, and analyst recognition.
How to Choose a Threat Intelligence Provider: Take the Next Step
The threat landscape won't wait for perfect planning, but thoughtful action today prevents tomorrow's breach. Take action now:
- Document your requirements
- Schedule stakeholder interviews to understand organizational needs
- Map your external attack surface to reveal hidden vulnerabilities
- Evaluate your current intelligence gaps
- Engage vendors with the use cases and success metrics already defined
Or schedule a demo today to find out how ZeroFox combines global collection capabilities, expert analysis, and seamless integration to defend your reputation, uphold customer trust, and safeguard business growth.