Methodology Overview

Identifying who might attack you, and how is at the core of our methodology. We profile the threat actors most relevant to your organization’s profile, industry, and critical business functions. Using a number of best suited structured analytical techniques, our analysts pinpoint the likely adversaries and their motives instead of chasing generic threats. This targeting logic means every scenario and insight is grounded in real-world adversary behavior that could credibly impact you. We assess each threat actor’s capabilities, tactics and objectives, building a clear picture of their Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures and more importantly, their preferred targets. By focusing on the threat actors most likely to target you and understanding their playbook, we ensure our intelligence and subsequent testing scenarios hone in on genuine risks, not hypotheticals. The output is a set of prioritized threat profiles and targeting logic that directly informs all planning and emulation activities.

We believe in collecting what matters, not collecting everything. Our collection planning is driven by your specific intelligence requirements and gaps. We develop a tailored collection plan mapping out the best sources and methods to gather relevant data from a number of sources, to industry threat sharing groups and internal telemetry. This plan is continually refined to avoid wasted effort or redundant data. Intelligence requirements provide the compass, while collection management ensures the team walks in the right direction. By aligning our collection to your business needs and threat landscape, we move from noise to insight focusing analysts’ efforts on high-value information and filtering out the rest. We blend multiple source types (technical feeds, human expertise, automated tooling) to cross-validate findings and fill coverage gaps. Throughout, we maintain discipline: adjusting the plan as threats evolve and ensuring we’re always gathering actionable intelligence rather than raw data. This methodology results in quality over quantity with a lean, purposeful collection that feeds meaningful analysis.

Translating intelligence into realistic attack simulation is where our tradecraft shines. We treat each engagement as a chance to think and act like the adversary, employing proven adversary emulation techniques. Our team takes the profiled threat actors and maps out their known tactics, tools, and behaviors (often leveraging frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK for completeness). We then design bespoke attack scenarios that mimic those adversaries’ techniques step by step, operating under the same conditions and constraints a real attacker would. This isn’t generic penetration testing – it’s intelligence-driven red teaming that requires research and creativity. We ensure the red team’s actions are guided by our threat intelligence: from initial reconnaissance through execution, every move aligns to the documented TTPs of the chosen threat actor. Our adversary emulation tradecraft also involves rigorous operational security (OPSEC) to stay stealthy and real-world attack chains to truly test your defenses. By emulating high-fidelity threat behaviors, we provide a test of your people, processes, and technology that mirrors a real attack – yielding far richer insights than a standard checklist-based test. (In short, we don’t just find vulnerabilities; we show how a skilled adversary would exploit them, so you can strengthen defenses where it counts.)

We pride ourselves on developing highly realistic and relevant scenarios for every engagement. Both the CBEST and TIBER-EU frameworks demand that test scenarios reflect real-life threats, not theoretical ones. In practice, this means our intelligence team crafts attack scenarios that emulate the TTPs of real threat actors currently active in your threat landscape. We incorporate up-to-date threat intelligence inclusive of recent attacker tactics and industry-specific risks – to ensure the scenario is credible and timely. Each scenario is also tailored to your organization: we consider your crown jewels (critical assets and services), known vulnerabilities, and the broader context in which an attacker would operate. The result is a narrative that feels plausible and uncomfortably close to reality, because it’s drawn from reality. These scenarios are the basis for the red team test plans, allowing for a practical simulation of an attack and a meaningful exercise of your detection and response capabilities. By keeping scenarios relevant and aligned to real threats, we make sure the findings from our work resonate – they clearly connect to genuine risks you face, which in turn drives more effective mitigation. (No contrived “what-if” hacktivist plots or random malware samples – only scenarios that matter to your business.)

Our deliverables bridge the gap between technical detail and strategic insight, empowering both executive and operational decision-makers. Every ThreatInsights report or briefing is crafted with dual audiences in mind. For leadership, we provide a crisp executive summary and high-level threat landscape analysis that explain why the assessed threats matter to the business in plain language. We highlight the potential impacts to your critical operations and provide risk assessments and recommendations that inform policy, investment, and strategic priorities. At the operational level, we deliver extensive technical details: from specific Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and attack chain narratives to MITRE ATT&CK mappings and TTP breakdowns that your security teams can act on. Crucially, our intelligence is packaged with actionability in mind – we don’t just list threats, we tell you what to do about them. For example, our reports help answer key questions:

• What to patch or protect first? (Which vulnerabilities or assets are most likely to be targeted by the profiled adversaries?)
• Who/what to monitor closely? (Which threat actors, tactics, or internal systems merit heightened monitoring based on current threat activity?)
• Where to allocate resources? (How to prioritize your cybersecurity investments or improvements for maximum risk reduction, given the threat insights?)
• How to respond to emerging threats? (Concrete guidance on detection and response playbooks for the simulated attack scenarios and beyond.)

In short, our intelligence outputs provide the clarity needed for both strategic and tactical decisions. They enable executives and boards to make informed risk decisions and demonstrate regulatory compliance, while giving operational teams the detailed knowledge to fine-tune defenses and respond effectively. We measure our success not in page counts, but in the decisions and actions our intelligence inspires.

Finally, we underscore the irreplaceable role of human analysts in our work. In an age of AI and automation, ThreatInsights stays human-led for a reason: seasoned analyst judgment is what gives data meaning. Our experts draw on years of experience tracking threat actors and understanding adversarial behavior. They apply intuition and contextual awareness that no tool can replicate – spotting subtle patterns, assessing intent, and judging credibility of intelligence. As one industry observer noted, the “intelligence” in threat intelligence ultimately comes from people: analysts who think like adversaries, experts who understand the client’s context, and researchers who turn data into actionable knowledge. We leverage automation for grunt work (e.g. data collection and initial correlation), but our analysts remain “in the loop” to validate findings, eliminate false positives, and connect the dots in a bigger picture. This human-driven approach ensures that critical threats don’t slip through the cracks amid the noise. Our team’s value isn’t in churning through raw indicators, it’s in asking the right questions and interpreting the answers to provide true insight. By investing in top talent and continuous training, we make certain that every assessment is rich with expert perspective. You’ll see the difference in the clarity and confidence of our reports. We don’t overwhelm you with data dumps; we deliver understanding. In cyber threat intelligence, quality of analysis and expertise matters far more than quantity, and our human-centric approach is core to delivering that quality.