Threat Intelligence · 5 min
Intelligence Lifecycle
From a stakeholder question to an answer they can use
This lesson explains the concept, then checks your understanding in a short interactive exercise.
Six recurring stages
Most intelligence teams describe their work as a cycle. The labels vary between organizations; the shape rarely does.
- Direction — agree the question and who needs it
- Collection — gather relevant internal and external sources
- Processing — normalize, deduplicate, translate, enrich
- Analysis — assess meaning, alternatives and confidence
- Dissemination — deliver in the form the consumer can act on
- Feedback — did it help? What changes next time?
Confidence and gaps
Analysts state judgments with explicit confidence, and name what they could not determine. An honest gap is more useful than a confident guess.
- High confidence — multiple reliable, corroborating sources
- Moderate confidence — credible but incomplete or single-source
- Low confidence — plausible, weakly supported, worth flagging
- Intelligence gap — the thing you still cannot answer
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