Cyber threat intelligence is an analysis of an adversary's intent, opportunity, and capability to do harm. This is a discipline within information security that requires a specific skill set and tools used by threat intelligence analysts.

Cyber intelligence is the ability to gain knowledge about an enterprise and its existing conditions and capabilities in order to determine the possible actions of an adversary when exploiting inherit critical vulnerabilities. It uses multiple information security disciplines (threat intelligence, vulnerability management, security configuration management, incident response, and so on) and tool sets to gather information about the network through monitoring and reporting to allow decision makers at all levels to prioritize risk mitigation.

Over the past few years, we've seen a list of new certifications focusing on penetration testing and ethical hacking. These skills are perfect for the personnel on the ground looking for vulnerabilities within organizations using tools and methods that a malicious actor would use. There are so many tools that provide the ability to look, find, monitor, and report on their environment. How do we apply those same concepts to the architecture of an enterprise? How do we think like an attacker and build the capability within our architectures with the capability to mitigate and/or reduce the risk? The goal of the following few sections is to create a proactive defense mindset and lay the foundation for building a cyber intelligence capability architecture in your organization.