Threat intelligence is useful when it changes a decision. A list of suspicious domains is not automatically an incident response, and a global headline is not proof that your organization is affected. Start by deciding who will use the evidence and what action they can take.
An African business may operate across countries, use cloud services hosted elsewhere and receive messages from international partners. Useful intelligence therefore combines regional relevance with technical and organizational context. A country label alone is too weak to determine risk.
Begin with decisions, not feeds
Identify a few recurring questions. Should staff trust this payment request? Does this advisory affect a service we run? Is a reported domain associated with known malicious activity? Should an incident be escalated?
Assign an owner for each question. A finance team can verify supplier payment changes, IT can check software versions, and a security analyst can examine indicator evidence. If nobody can act on a feed, adding more records may only create noise.
Understand the source and its limits
AEGLIX Threat Feeds brings together available source-linked observations. URLhaus focuses on malware-delivery URLs; OpenPhish provides phishing observations; ThreatFox provides malware-related indicators. Their coverage, freshness and access conditions differ.
Do not relabel every malware observation as phishing. Do not assume an indicator tagged Africa proves victims in an African country. Source timestamps, region inference and retrieval dates should remain visible. An empty snapshot can reflect missing coverage or a provider problem.
For older observations, retained evidence may be useful even after a malicious URL goes offline. Keep the original report and the date relevant to your decision. Today's retrieval is not necessarily today's attack.
Connect indicators to an investigation
Use Investigation to examine a reported domain, URL, IP or hash using available evidence. Record exactly what was checked and what was not found. No matching history is an uncertainty statement, not a clean bill of health.
If several indicators appear related, avoid jumping directly to a named threat actor. Shared hosting or a popular registrar can create associations between unrelated services. Campaign Intelligence can provide reviewed context where a published relationship exists; unknown attribution should remain unknown.
Add asset relevance to vulnerability alerts
Use CVEs to locate vulnerability information, then verify affected versions and mitigations with the original vendor. Combine severity, known exploitation evidence and your actual exposure. A critical score on software you do not run is a different problem from a known-exploited issue on an internet-facing service you own.
Maintain an action record: affected asset, owner, evidence, mitigation, deadline and verification. Patching a vulnerability does not by itself establish that earlier compromise did not happen.
Give staff a short reporting path
Employees should know where to send a suspicious message without broadcasting it to everyone. A reporting process can preserve timestamps and context while limiting the spread of harmful links or sensitive account information.
Guardian offers voluntary URL, message and screenshot-text checks. Remove secrets before using an external service, review extracted text for mistakes and read source coverage alongside AI explanations. A scanner should support independent verification of a consequential payment or account request.
Keep the output small and actionable
A weekly note should distinguish observations from conclusions. Include a few relevant developments, why they matter to your assets, the original evidence, the assigned action and unresolved questions. Do not manufacture country-specific incident counts from a limited feed.
The weekly Africa phishing report summarizes only the eligible stored observations described in its methodology. It is a starting point for research, not a measure of all phishing against African businesses.
Review whether the workflow helps
Measure whether reports reached the right owner, whether affected systems were verified and whether actions were completed. Record false alarms, stale data and provider failures as well as successes. Avoid collecting confidential message text merely to measure engagement.
Use Security News for discovery and follow original reporting before acting. For implementation software, compare source-linked options in Arsenal. Keep the workflow proportional to the team's capacity: a small number of well-supported decisions is more useful than an impressive dashboard with no follow-through.
Sources
- URLhaus