How to Enrich Alerts with Live Attack Data from 15K SOCs 

How to Enrich Alerts with Live Attack Data from 15K SOCs 

Every SOC analyst knows the frustration. Your SIEM generates hundreds, sometimes thousands of alerts daily.

Each alert demands attention, but with limited time and resources, how do you prioritize effectively? Investigating each alert in isolation leaves teams reactive, overwhelmed, and ultimately vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that blend into the background noise. 

The Alert Triage Dilemma: Drowning in Data, Starving for Context 

The challenge isn’t just volume; it’s context. An IP address flagged in your network might seem innocuous until you discover it’s been actively targeting companies in your industry for weeks.

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A file hash that appears benign could be part of a broader campaign that’s already compromised your competitors. Without this broader intelligence picture, even skilled analysts operate with one hand tied behind their back. 

Threat actors can establish persistence, exfiltrate data, and disappear within hours, sometimes minutes. Your detection capabilities need to match this velocity, identifying threats not just accurately, but immediately upon first contact. 

This is where the concept of collective defense becomes invaluable. While your organization may be seeing a particular indicator for the first time, the global security community may have encountered it repeatedly.  

The challenge lies in accessing this collective knowledge in actionable, real-time formats that integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows. This is the challenge that services like ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup accept. 

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Threat Intelligence Lookup main page: search IOCs, explore TTPs, use YARA rules 

Industry as a Target: You’re Not Alone in Their Crosshairs 

Attackers rarely target individual companies in isolation. They target industries, supply chains, and geographic regions. If you’re in financial services and your competitors are under attack, you’re likely next.

If you’re a healthcare provider and similar organizations in your region are being compromised, consider yourself on borrowed time. 

Threat actors invest significant resources in understanding specific industry verticals, developing specialized tools and techniques optimized for particular business environments.

Once they’ve honed their approach against one target in your sector, they’ll systematically apply these proven methods across similar organizations. 

Why Outside Incident Data Is Priceless 

Intelligence about attacks against industry peers isn’t just interesting context. It’s predictive intelligence.

When analysts understand the complete scope of ongoing campaigns against their sector, they can proactively hunt for early indicators rather than wait for attacks to fully manifest in their environment.  

Your SOC sees what happens in your network. But attackers are reusing domains, IPs, samples, and behaviors across many victims.

Having access to incident data from other companies gives you a shortcut: instead of spending hours figuring out if an alert is malicious, you can check instantly against real-world attack data. 

ANY.RUN Threat Intelligence Lookup: Instant IOC Validation 

With Threat Intelligence Lookup, SOC analysts can: 

  • Enter an IOC (hash, IP, domain, URL, or file). 
  • Instantly see whether it appeared in real-world attacks observed across thousands of SOCs. 
  • Get context such as malware family, behavior, and timestamps of activity. 
  • Validate whether an alert points to a real, ongoing threat — or just background noise 

This shifts alert triage from manual, time-consuming validation to fast, confident decision-making backed by live attack evidence. 

Start using TI Lookup for free to make quick decisions on possible threats: Sign up to start.

The source of the threat data explorable by TI Lookup is ANY.RUN’s Interactive Sandbox.

It is used daily by over 15,000 SOCs worldwide: analysts at these organizations detonate suspicious files, investigate malware behavior, and analyze attack campaigns using ANY.RUN’s cloud-based environment. This creates an unprecedented repository of live attack intelligence. 

For threat analysts and hunters, ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup provides: 

  • Faster triage: Instantly confirm whether an alert IOC is tied to a live attack. 
  • Reduced fatigue: Cut hours of manual investigation by checking IOCs in seconds. 
  • Higher detection confidence: Spot adversaries using the same infrastructure elsewhere. 
  • Better hunting: Pivot on related IOCs and uncover hidden connections in your environment. 
  • Collective defense: Leverage the insights of 15,000 SOCs worldwide to strengthen your own. 

TI Lookup in Action: How to Use It 

ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup is available on a free plan with limited search parameters allowing to complete basic analyst tasks.

Let’s take the above-mentioned use case to see how it works: a dubious IP address detected in your system. Look it up and get an instant verdict:  

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An IP lookup results with a quick verdict and additional IOCs 

We can see that the IP has been flagged as malicious and has been spotted in most recent incidents. For more context, we can switch to the “Analyses” tab and quickly discover that it belongs to Agent Tesla spyware:  

destinationIP:”173.254.31.34″ 
 

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Malware samples analyzed in the Sandbox, found by IP search

Premium Capabilities for Advanced Security Operations 

When you are ready for a level-up, the Premium plan transforms TI Lookup into a comprehensive security intelligence platform: 

  • Advanced Search Operations: Over 40 search parameters with complex operators (AND, OR, NOT) enable precise threat hunting and investigation workflows. 
  • Complete Attack Visibility: Access to all available analysis sessions rather than just the 20 most recent, providing comprehensive historical context. 
  • Private Intelligence: Conduct confidential searches and investigations without visibility to other users, protecting sensitive security operations. 
  • Continuous Monitoring: Search Updates feature provides automated alerts when new threats match your specified criteria, ensuring your team stays ahead of emerging campaigns. 
  • Expert Analysis: TI Reports from ANY.RUN’s analyst team deliver strategic insights on attack trends and threat actor activities across industries. 

Here is an example of a lookup search query you can use on Premium plan: more search parameters (registryKey, registryValue) and operators (NOT) are available; over 500 sandbox sessions found so that an analyst can observe certain malware behavior.   

registryKey:”Run$” AND registryValue:”.url$” NOT threatName:”darkvision” 

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Malware samples demonstrating certain behavior found via TI Lookup 

Request full access to TI Lookup for actionable threat investigation: Contact ANY.RUN now 

Embrace the Power of Collective Defense  

The modern threat landscape demands a fundamental shift from isolated defense to collective intelligence. No single organization, regardless of size or resources, can match the comprehensive threat visibility that emerges from global collaboration.

ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup represents this collaborative approach in action: instant access to intelligence derived from 15,000 SOCs struggling to analyze and understand active threats. 

In a world where attackers share techniques, tools, and targets across the global threat landscape, defenders must respond with equal coordination and real-time intelligence sharing.

ANY.RUN’s Threat Intelligence Lookup provides the immediate access infrastructure to make this collective defense practical and operational. 


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About Cybernoz

Security researcher and threat analyst with expertise in malware analysis and incident response.