How to Build a Threat-Informed Defense: Why You Need to Understand Adversaries

Security teams need to move from reactive patching to threat-informed defence by understanding who is targeting them, how they operate, and what they want, the article argues. It explains that many teams suffer a blind spot between alerts and real adversaries, and that actionable threat intelligence helps prioritise responses, anticipate patterns, and justify budgets.

A case study of Akira Ransomware illustrates how translating threat actor profiles into defence can close initial access vectors, monitor credential dumping, and protect backup and virtualization infrastructure, noting that Akira has claimed over $244 million in ransom payments since March 2023 and impacted more than 470 organisations in 2025 alone.

The piece outlines practical steps such as patching CVE-2023-20269, deploying MFA, monitoring for living-off-the-land techniques, and segmenting critical backups, all framed by threat actor TTPs and infrastructure. According to SOCRadar, threat intelligence platforms help filter actors by target country, industry, and tactics, enabling SOC teams to act on context rather than noise.