Threat intelligence is the cornerstone of proactive security. By collecting and analyzing indicators of compromise (IOCs), tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and adversary infrastructure, threat intelligence tools help cybersecurity teams spot attacks before they escalate.

But here’s the catch: Most tools stop at surfacing raw intel. They hand you the data but don’t help you operationalize it. This results in analysts drowning in noise, alert fatigue, and slow incident response times.

Explore the top categories of threat intelligence tools and see how Torq Hyperautomation bridges the gap between intel and action, delivering real-time enrichment and autonomous response at scale.

What Threat Intelligence Tools Do

Collect data: Ingests signals from OSINT, dark web sources, malware sandboxes, DNS/WHOIS, product telemetry, ISACs, and commercial vendor feeds to build a comprehensive threat picture.

Normalize and enrich: Standardizes formats, deduplicates indicators, and adds context — actor, campaign, TTPs, confidence, and sightings — so data is usable and trustworthy.

Correlate and score: Links indicators to behaviors using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK and assign risk and confidence to drive prioritization.

Distribute intel: Pushes curated intelligence to SIEM, EDR, or SOAR via APIs and STIX/TAXII, often triggering automated playbooks.

Search and investigate: Lets analysts pivot across IPs, domains, and hashes, build campaign timelines, and track adversary infrastructure.

Report and measure: Provides dashboards, alerts, and takedown and mitigation guidance while tracking coverage and efficacy.

Threat Intelligence Tooling Categories

• Feeds (Raw indicators): Continuous streams of IPs, domains, hashes, phishing kits, and C2 infrastructure.
• Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): Central hubs that aggregate sources, dedupe and score indicators, enable sharing, and orchestrate automation.
• Vertical/Community intel: ISAC/ISAO groups that facilitate trusted, sector-specific sharing of timely threats and mitigations.
• Managed TI services: Provider-run offerings where human analysts deliver curated, finished intelligence and advisory support.

4 Types of Threat Intelligence

1. Strategic (Board/CISO): High-level trends, risks, and business impact to inform investment and policy.
2. Operational (SOC/IR): Campaign-level insights — adversaries, infrastructure, and TTPs — translated into detections and response actions.
3. Tactical (Detections): Short-lived IOCs with confidence and expiry to feed blocklists and detection rules.
4. Technical (Artifacts): Low-level signatures and artifacts — YARA/Sigma rules, decoders, and malware I/O — used to research and codify detections.

While threat intelligence is vital for shifting from reactive to proactive security, most tools stop short of execution. They provide intel but don’t automate triage or incident response, leaving a critical gap in the security kill chain.

Why Threat Intelligence Alone Isn’t Enough

“Threat intelligence — while abundant — is frequently underutilized due to inconsistent application and a lack of objective analysis, keeping teams stuck in reactive mode.”

– SANS 2025 SOC Survey

High-quality threat intelligence is essential for modern security operations, but even the best intel feeds can only take you so far. Many SOC teams still struggle to operationalize that intelligence effectively, facing challenges such as:

• Siloed data sources: Threat intel often lives in separate tools and feeds, requiring analysts to manually pivot between consoles to correlate indicators with events in their environment. This not only slows investigations but also risks missing connections entirely.
• Alert fatigue from unverified IOCs: Raw intelligence feeds can produce an overwhelming volume of indicators of compromise (IOCs). Without automated context and verification, analysts are forced to triage a flood of alerts, many of which turn out to be irrelevant or false positives.
• Slow MTTR due to manual processes: Even when malicious activity is identified, enrichment, prioritization, and incident response often rely on a series of manual steps. This delays containment, gives adversaries more time to act, and increases the likelihood of impact.

The missing link is security Hyperautomation: The ability to take incoming threat intelligence and enrich it in real time, validate it against your environment, prioritize based on risk, and execute the right response automatically.

With Hyperautomation in place, security teams can:

• Instantly correlate threat intel with live telemetry from SIEM, EDR, IAM, and cloud security tools.
• Automatically filter out low-confidence or irrelevant IOCs before they reach analysts.
• Trigger pre-approved auto-remediation workflows such as blocking a domain, isolating an endpoint, or disabling a compromised account in seconds.

Threat intelligence is powerful, but it becomes truly operational when paired with automation. That’s how teams turn static data into actionable, measurable defense at machine speed.

The Power of Automated Alert Enrichment

Threat intelligence enrichment is the critical bridge between raw threat data and meaningful, actionable threat intelligence. It transforms a bare IOC or alert into a fully contextualized security event, giving analysts the information they need to make faster, more confident decisions.

Without enrichment, a malicious IP alert is just a red flag without a story. You know something might be wrong, but you don’t know:

• Who controls the IP
• When it was first reported as malicious
• Whether it has been active in other attacks
• If it’s currently interacting with your environment

With threat enrichment, those questions are answered instantly. You can see ownership, reputation scores, historical abuse records, and whether the threat currently targets your assets. This drastically reduces false positives, helps prioritize real threats, and accelerates triage, especially in high-volume SOC environments.

Real-Time Enrichment with Torq

Torq automates this process end-to-end, ingesting IOCs from virtually any source:

• Open-source feeds like AbuseIPDB or AlienVault OTX
• Commercial CTI platforms such as Recorded Future or CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence
• Internal telemetry from SIEM, EDR, IAM, and CSPM systems

Once ingested, Torq automatically enriches each IOC or alert with:

• Threat intelligence lookups for risk scoring and category classification
• WHOIS data to identify domain or IP ownership
• GeoIP mapping for geographic attribution
• Historical incident correlation to see if this IOC has appeared in past investigations

All of this happens without writing a single line of code, using Torq’s no-code/low-code visual builder.

Connecting Enrichment to Automated Response

Enrichment is all about enabling faster, more precise action. With Torq, once an alert is enriched, it can immediately trigger targeted, pre-approved response runbooks, such as:

• Block malicious IPs or domains at the firewall or secure web gateway
• Disable compromised accounts in IAM systems like Okta or Azure AD
• Quarantine infected endpoints via EDR tools like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne
• Notify analysts in Slack or Microsoft Teams with full, structured context for review

Because enrichment and incident response are linked in the same Hyperautomation workflow, there’s no waiting for an analyst to manually look up data before taking action — vulnerabilities are validated, prioritized, and remediated in near real time.

Real-World Use Cases: How Torq Elevates Your Threat Intelligence Stack

IOC-Triggered Triage

Scenario: A new malicious IP is published by Abuse.ch’s SSL Blacklist feed.

How Torq Handles It:

1. The IOC enters Torq through a scheduled or webhook-based integration with Abuse.ch.
2. Torq automatically enriches it with:
   • Recorded Future for risk scoring and threat actor attribution.
   • VirusTotal for file and domain associations.
   • WHOIS and GeoIP for ownership and location details.
3. The enriched IOC is compared against SIEM and EDR telemetry to see if it’s active in your environment.
4. Based on the risk score and internal matches, Torq either:
   • Auto-blocks the IP in your firewall and secure web gateway.
   • Escalates the IOC to a case in Torq for analyst review.

Result: Threats are validated and acted on within seconds, without manual lookups or context switching.

Autonomous Response to High-Risk Alerts

Scenario: Correlated threat intel and internal detections reveal an active phishing campaign targeting corporate users.

How Torq Handles It:

1. The IOC feed from a commercial CTI provider flags multiple domains tied to a phishing kit.
2. Torq cross-references internal email gateway logs to confirm delivery attempts to specific users.
3. Upon confirmation, Torq executes automated actions:
   • Revokes credentials in Okta or Azure AD for targeted accounts.
   • Sends a Slack or Teams alert to affected users with security guidance.
   • Updates the SIEM with an incident record for correlation and compliance.

Result: Compromised accounts are secured, and users are alerted before threat actors can exploit access.

Threat Intel + Phishing Detection

Scenario: A user reports a suspicious email via the company’s phishing reporting button.

How Torq Handles It:

1. The reported email is sent to Torq via Microsoft 365 Security or Proofpoint TAP integration.
2. Torq extracts sender domains, IPs, and embedded URLs.
3. Those indicators are checked against:
   • External threat intel feeds like AlienVault OTX and Abuse.ch.
   • Internal blocklists and historical case data in Torq.
4. If confirmed malicious, Torq:
   • Quarantines the email for all recipients at the email gateway.
   • Blocks the domain in the web proxy.
   • Notifies the reporting user with a “verified malicious” confirmation.

Result: A single user report becomes a fully automated, organization-wide protection action.

Scalable Enrichment Without Developer Overhead

Scenario: The SOC wants to enrich all IOC feeds with cross-platform intelligence but lacks developer bandwidth.

How Torq Handles It:

1. An analyst drags and drops connectors for Recorded Future, VirusTotal, AbuseIPDB, and MISP into the workflow canvas.
2. Using Torq’s no-code visual editor, the analyst chains enrichment steps, scoring logic, and conditional response rules.
3. New threat intel feeds can be added in minutes, and workflows update automatically without engineering intervention.

Result: The SOC scales enrichment capabilities rapidly, integrating multiple TI sources and incident response actions without waiting on dev cycles.

Threat Intelligence Is Only as Good as the Action It Enables

Threat intelligence is the spark that ignites detection, but it’s the action you take with that intelligence that determines whether it prevents an attack or becomes just another line in a report. Without automation, even the most curated and timely feeds leave SOC teams drowning in manual triage, correlation, and remediation steps.

The challenge is operationalizing threat intelligence at machine speed, ingesting, validating, enriching, and acting on it in seconds, not hours. That requires an automation platform that connects intelligence sources directly to your detection, investigation, and response layers.

What to Look for in an Automated Threat Intelligence Stack

To fully realize the value of your threat intel, your automation stack should deliver:

• Interoperability: Native integrations with SIEM, SOAR, EDR, firewall, email security, and CTI feeds so threat data flows seamlessly across tools.
• Real-time enrichment: The ability to instantly enhance IOCs with reputation scores, geo-location, WHOIS data, historical activity, and related incidents, and feed that context back into detection and response systems.
• Scalability: Capacity to process thousands (or millions) of IOCs per day without slowing down, whether from burst attack campaigns or ongoing intelligence streams.
• No-code flexibility: The option for analysts to adapt, expand, or fine-tune workflows without relying on developer resources, so you can pivot quickly to new threats.

Why Torq Is Built for Modern Threat Detection

Torq’s Hyperautomation Platform turns raw threat intel into orchestrated action across your SOC. It’s designed to:

• Automate at scale with autonomous runbooks that can process and act on high IOC volumes without analyst intervention.
• Integrate instantly using agentless, native connectors to 1,000+ tools — from threat intel platforms like Recorded Future, VirusTotal, and MISP to your SIEM, EDR, and firewall stack.
• Enable SOC agility through a visual no-code/low-code editor and AI workflow building, so analysts can build or modify enrichment and incident response workflows in minutes.
• Drive immediate outcomes — blocking malicious IPs, quarantining emails, disabling compromised accounts, or alerting security analysts— all triggered by enriched intel in real time.

With Torq, threat intelligence isn’t just data; it’s a live signal that moves seamlessly from detection to decision to remediation, without manual processing delays.

Categories of Threat Intelligence Tools Cybersecurity Teams Rely On

Operationalize Threat Intelligence Tools with Torq

Great threat intelligence tools surface what’s out there; Torq turns that signal into outcomes. By ingesting feeds and TIPs, normalizing to common schemas, enriching with WHOIS/GeoIP/reputation, and correlating against your SIEM/EDR/IAM telemetry, Torq’s no-code Hyperautomation moves from detect to resolve in seconds — automatically. 

Pre-approved playbooks block domains and IPs, isolate endpoints, revoke access, and notify stakeholders in chat, all with full audit trails and role-based control. The result: lower MTTR, less downtime, fewer manual escalations, a stronger security posture, and a calmer on-call.

If you’re investing in threat intelligence tools but still triaging by hand, you’re leaving value on the table. Pair your intel with automation that’s interoperable, explainable, and scalable so every high-confidence indicator translates into immediate, governed action.

Ready to turn intel into impact? See how Torq can help make your SOC more efficient. 

FAQs

Phishing has evolved from a nuisance into a full-blown crisis for SOC teams. Once easy to spot, today’s phishing emails are polished, personalized, and powered by generative AI — enabling attackers to launch thousands of realistic campaigns in minutes. 

SOCs are drowning in suspicious email reports, with analysts forced to inspect headers, attachments, and URLs at scale manually. Even worse, over a majority of end-user reports turn out to be false positives, meaning hours of wasted effort chasing noise instead of responding to real threats.

Why Phishing Analysis Overwhelms SOC Teams

Phishing isn’t just the most common cyberattack; it’s also one of the most draining for security teams. Attacks have increased 49% since 2021, with each successful breach costing organizations nearly $5M on average. GenAI has fueled a 4,151% increase in phishing campaigns since 2022, so the volume and realism of phishing attempts are outpacing traditional defenses.

Phishing analysis is the process of examining suspicious emails to identify and mitigate phishing attacks. This involves scrutinizing various aspects of the email, including sender details, content, and attachments, to detect signs of malicious intent. It’s a critical component of cybersecurity, helping organizations protect themselves from data breaches and other cyber threats.

For SOC analysts, every reported phishing email can become a time sink. Investigations require painstaking review of headers, attachments, URLs, and sender reputation checks — often across multiple tools. A Microsoft study found 90% of user-reported phishing emails turn out to be false positives, yet each still consumes valuable analyst time. At scale, that means thousands of hours spent chasing noise while real threats risk slipping through the cracks.

This perfect storm of higher alert volume, more sophisticated lures, and limited staff creates an unsustainable workload. Instead of focusing on strategic tasks like threat hunting or incident response, analysts get buried in repetitive phishing checks. The result: Burnout, alert fatigue, and delayed response times that adversaries exploit to their advantage.

With the help of automation taking over the repetitive triage and enrichment tasks that bog analysts down, platforms like Torq HyperSOC™ slash analysis times from hours to minutes, eliminate the majority of false positives, and free security teams to focus on threats that actually matter.

How to Automate Outlook Mailbox Monitoring with Torq

Torq HyperSOC™ includes ready-to-run templates that transform your phishing inbox into an always-on, case-driven automation pipeline. Here’s how it works end-to-end, plus the setup details, best practices, and guardrails that make it safe at scale.

1. Turn Your Mailbox into an Always-On Detection Pipeline

Instead of relying on analysts to check a shared phishing inbox, Torq connects directly to Microsoft Outlook using Microsoft Graph API. A dedicated mailbox (for example, [email protected]) becomes an automated trigger point, and every new report instantly kicks off an enrichment and triage workflow. This integration is secure by design, using least-privilege permissions and admin-controlled access policies to keep everything locked down.

2. Automate the Analysis

Once a message lands, Torq automatically extracts and analyzes the essential data: headers, links, attachments, sender reputation, and user context. Behind the scenes, AI and security Hyperautomation handle all the enrichment tasks that typically burn analyst time — checking SPF/DKIM, scanning URLs and attachments, detonating files in sandboxes, and cross-referencing with threat intel. This leaves analysts with a fully scored, context-rich case that tells you whether it’s safe, suspicious, or malicious, all before a human ever touches it.

3. Respond at Machine Speed 

When Torq confirms a threat, response happens automatically but safely. The platform can:

• Quarantine malicious emails organization-wide
• Block domains or senders
• Isolate infected endpoints or reset credentials through integrated EDR and IAM tools
• Notify users with templated guidance (e.g., “Did you click…?”) for added validation
• Log every action, approval, and artifact in a complete, auditable case file

Everything runs according to your organization’s policies; automation never overrides human approval for sensitive actions.

4. Get Case Management That Writes Itself

Each investigation is automatically converted into a structured case, complete with enriched data, screenshots, indicators, and an easy-to-read AI-generated summary. Analysts can quickly review, bulk-close false positives, or pivot into related cases for campaign hunting — all from a single workspace.

What once took hours now happens in seconds, freeing your team to focus on strategy and proactive threat hunting instead of inbox cleanup.

5. Enforce AI Guardrails

Automation at scale only works if it’s safe, and Torq was built with that in mind. Every workflow runs with built-in AI governance, compliance, and resiliency features designed for enterprise SOCs and MSSPs.

• Least-privilege access: Microsoft Graph permissions are scoped to a single mailbox or folder, minimizing exposure.
• Role-based access controls (RBAC) and approvals: Sensitive actions like global purges or account disables always require the right role or human confirmation.
• Self-healing subscriptions: Torq automatically monitors Microsoft Graph subscriptions, renews them before expiration, and alerts if something drifts.
• Resilient error handling: Smart retries and throttling logic keep automations stable under API load or transient faults.
• MSSP-ready tenant isolation: Shared automations can be cloned per customer, ensuring strict data separation with zero cross-tenant risk.

6. Experience What “Good” Looks Like

A well-built phishing response automation doesn’t just run — it delivers measurable impact. Here are the key KPIs that show it’s working:

• Faster MTTD / MTTR: Phishing cases identified and contained in minutes, not hours
• Broader automation coverage: A growing percentage of Tier-1 triage handled end-to-end with zero human touch
• Reduced false positives: Fewer manual reviews and cleaner queues for analysts
• Better purge performance: Malicious messages removed across mailboxes more quickly and completely.
• Higher user engagement: High confirmation rates and faster user responses to “Did you click?” checks
• Improved analyst efficiency: Hours reclaimed per case — often hundreds of hours per quarter — that can be reinvested into proactive security work

When these numbers start trending up and manual reviews drop off, that’s when you know your automation is transforming the SOC.

Faster, Smarter, and Scalable Phishing Analysis

Torq cuts phishing triage from hours to minutes. Automated enrichment includes:

• DMARC/SPF analysis to validate sender reputation
• URL screenshotting to detect impersonation
• Sandbox detonations and IOC checks for attachments
• AI-generated summaries of findings, ready for analyst review

The outcome: faster investigations, fewer false positives, and higher analyst efficiency.

Torq Makes Traditional Phishing Analysis Tools Better

Legacy SOAR tools require rigid playbooks and manual tuning. Torq delivers:

• No/low-code flexibility: Build workflows in minutes.
• Agentic AI: Summarizes, enriches, and prioritizes phishing cases.
• 300+ integrations: Connects to your SIEM, EDR, IAM, ITSM, and email stack.
• Scalability: Automate phishing triage across thousands of alerts with no extra headcount.

Make Phishing Analysis Autonomous

Phishing isn’t slowing down — but your team doesn’t have to slow down with it.

With Torq HyperSOC™, phishing analysis becomes fast, reliable, and fully automated. Every reported email is enriched, scored, and resolved in minutes, with full visibility and control. By turning repetitive triage into efficient and autonomous workflows, Torq helps SOCs reclaim time, eliminate false positives, and focus on stopping real threats before they spread.

Check out our SOC Efficiency Guide for tips on squeezing the most out of your SOC processes, people, and tech stack.

FAQs