What CISOs want from Cyber Threat Intelligence

The SANS 2026 Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) Survey delivered a finding that should make every threat intelligence practitioner stop and think: 91% of CISOs value CTI, but only 26% say it significantly influences their decisions.

This is not a credibility problem, and CISOs are not questioning whether the intelligence is accurate. They’re saying the intelligence reaching their desks does not tell them what to do next. The gap between “this is useful information” and “this changed how I allocated resources” is the defining CTI challenge, and closing it requires a shift in how teams produce and deliver intel.

What CISOs Are Actually Asking For

CISOs don’t need more intelligence. They need intelligence that has already been validated against their environment, prioritized against what adversaries are actually doing right now, and tuned to their specific business context. Look at what CISOs say they want most over the next 12 months:

• 79% want information about vulnerabilities being actively targeted by attackers
• 77% want specific adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)
• 78% rate incident after-action reports as among the most useful CTI products
• 89% rate threat landscape reports as useful for situational awareness

The pattern is clear: the top requests aren’t for more raw feeds or broader coverage. They’re for intelligence that has already done the analytical work of separating signal from noise.

Generic threat landscape reports describing broad ransomware trends are useful for situational awareness, but a report that maps an actively exploited vulnerability to assets in your environment, links it to the TTP a specific adversary group is using against organizations in your sector, and recommends a remediation priority is the detail that CISOs want. The gap is with how intelligence is packaged, connected to business context, and delivered to decision-makers.

A vulnerability management team that tells the IT infrastructure team that they need to patch 100 CVEs by next Tuesday likely won’t win friends. CTI context that provides actionability and prioritization can win them. As Will Glass, Intel 471 Senior Intel Collection Manager, put it at the 2026 SANS CTI Survey panel, “If I can describe to you these couple of CVEs that are being used by this particular ransomware actor that tends to break in by using a CVE in our deployed VPN solution, now I’m speaking their language. I’ve identified hopefully a manageable number of CVEs that IT owners can get behind and decide this is important enough that I’m going to stay up all night to take down a system that’s in production so I can patch it and we’re protected against this in the future.”

Four Actions That Can Close the Gap

The SANS survey identifies four shifts that move CTI teams from being appreciated to being influential. Each is grounded in delivering intelligence that has already been validated and prioritized for the decision at hand.

Here are the four actions CTI teams can take in partnership with Intel 471:

• Build decision packages, not intelligence briefings. Structure intelligence products around the decisions executives are actually making to help them understand which risks require action now, where to allocate budget, and what to tell the board. This is more valuable than telling them about the threats analysts are tracking. Lead with the recommendation. Support it with evidence. Make the required action explicit.

This can be done through structured interviews with the stakeholders who consume your intelligence, extract their Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs), and build analytical traceability to prove ROI. This goes beyond describing technical threats to delivering strategic decision packages that shape risk posture, justify budget, and guide security investment.

• Connect CTI directly to vulnerability management. The survey shows 79% of CISOs want vulnerability intelligence and 63% of CTI teams already support vulnerability management. What is missing is making the connection explicit. Decision makers want to know how threat intel shapes which vulnerabilities get patched first and how quickly.

A simple way of accomplishing this is building a monthly one-pager that maps actively exploited CVEs to your environment and assigns each a recommended remediation priority. This actionable plan offers IT teams manageable patches and shows how threat intelligence is reducing organizational risk. Parallel mapping of CTI to threat hunting and detection engineering also helps validate threats and prioritizes remediation against your technology stack.

• Make incident after-action reports a standard deliverable. Every incident is an opportunity to demonstrate CTI value through real outcomes. Adding a CTI contribution section to every post-incident review builds the evidence base that justifies investment far more persuasively than any capability briefing.

Analysts are typically asked retroactively to answer questions like: Was intelligence available before this incident? Was it acted on? What would earlier action have required? Having answers to these provides evidence of CTI’s role in real events. That evidence moves CTI from a background function to a program leadership credits and funds differently.

• Pilot business-focused intelligence. Only 41% of CISOs find business-focused intelligence valuable today, almost certainly because they have rarely seen it produced. M&A risk assessments, supply chain threat profiles, and brand exposure analysis represent an entirely new category of CTI value. The first team to fill that gap creates a new category of influence inside their organization.

How Intel 471 Supports this Work

The four actions above are framework-level changes any CTI team can adopt. Executing them well requires the underlying intelligence to be validated and prioritized in the first place, which is where Intel 471 can help.

The Intel 471 Adversary Intelligence team operates its cyber HUMINT program at an unmatched scale, leveraging direct engagement with threat actors to provide deep pre-attack insights into adversary TTPs, behaviors and tools. Their consistent methods for grading the reliability of human-sourced information helps customers cut through the noise of unpredictable threat actors seeking to boost reputation. The Verity471 cyber intelligence platform helps you close the gap between intelligence and action by pivoting from operational intelligence across adversaries, malware and weaponized vulnerabilities directly to exposure findings and behavioral detection packages.

Intel 471's HUNTER scales up SecOps teams with a behavioral hunt package library and tools to proactively hunt for most advanced TTPs. Teams use HUNTER to reduce dwell time, validate TTP and telemetry coverage and drive new detections. Each package contains the latest CTI context — the hypothesis, the actors or malware behind the behavior, why it warrants action, and the query to detect it — providing security leaders a full picture of the threat and actions they can take to mitigate it. Additionally, our Actionable Hunt Plans help customers answer which vulnerabilities are being weaponized against their sector to prioritize specific hunt packages.

Intel 471's Exposure modules complete the loop, mapping our proprietary underground CTI to unpatched CVEs affecting your externally visible assets to help leaders understand what remediation to prioritize. The Third-Party Exposure module extends this visibility into the supply chain, surfacing vendor-side risks including unpatched CVEs, new breaches and active targeting indicators. Brand monitoring detects credential exposure and impersonation infrastructure before it becomes operational.

The new Retroactive Threat Detection tool on Verity471 can be used during incident after-action reports. The tool instantly converts IoCs from our intelligence reports into tool-native detection queries that analysts can run against their historical logs to establish a timeline and assess whether earlier action was possible. This kind of evidence transforms CTI from a background function into a program leadership actively credits and funds, making it easy to demonstrate value during post-incident reviews.

Together, these capabilities answer the questions the SANS survey identifies as most urgent for CISOs: which vulnerabilities require action now and what should we be hunting for?

Closing the gap

Understanding what a threat actor is capable of is one thing. Knowing whether they can reach you is another.

Closing this gap doesn’t require more headcount or a bigger budget. It requires intelligence that has been validated against reality, prioritized against what’s happening right now, and delivered in a format that tells you exactly what to do next. The four actions listed earlier are where any CTI team can start.

If you want a structured path through this work, Intel 471’s Intelligence Planning Workshop can help you get there. Practitioners learn how to identify stakeholder Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs), build analytical traceability, and quantify business outcomes across the CTI Capability Maturity Model’s (CTI-CMM) 11 stakeholder domains. With proper measurement, you can defend a budget, influence executive decisions and be recognized by the business.

Ready to close the gap in your program? Learn more about the Intel 471 Intelligence Planning Workshop and reserve your spot.