Sun Tzu's Art of War includes the strategic concept of knowing your adversary and knowing yourself. Through this, you can be confident in your ability to prevail in the contest. Threat intelligence has quickly become a critical component of an organization's proactive security controls, as well as an important factor in its ability to respond to an incident. This chapter examined the emerging techniques and methodologies of cyber threat intelligence, and the sources, technology, and methods to put this data to use.

To move forward, organizations looking to leverage the advantages that threat intelligence provides must first understand the threat. From there, they can define their requirements and begin the intelligence process. Finally, by integrating their toolset to utilize threat intelligence, they can position themselves to have more effective proactive controls and the ability to respond efficiently. While threat intelligence may not remove the fear of an adversary entirely, it allows organizations a good deal more ammunition to combat today's threats. Threat intelligence also serves as an important function when looking at the proactive practice of identifying threats in an environment through threat hunting, which is the subject of the next chapter.