3 decisions CISOs must make to prevent downtime risk in 2026

hacker newsJanuary 29, 2026Threat intelligence/incident response

In addition to the direct impact of a cyberattack, businesses suffer from a secondary but potentially even more costly risk: operational downtime, no matter how much it occurs, leading to very real damage. Therefore, it is important for CISOs to prioritize decisions that reduce dwell time and protect the company from risk.

Three strategic steps you can take this year to get better results:

1. Focus on today’s real business security risks

An effective SOC is powered by relevant data. This enables targeted and prioritized action against threats. While public or low-quality feeds may have been sufficient in the past, in 2026 threat actors will be better funded, more connected, and more dangerous than ever before. Accurate and timely information is a decisive factor in countering them.

Due to a lack of relevant data, SOCs are unable to remain focused on the actual risks involved at this time. Only a continuously updated feed based on active threat research enables smart, proactive action.

STIX/TAXII compatible threat intelligence feeds from ANY.RUN allow security teams to focus on threats targeting today’s organizations. Based on the latest manual malware and phishing research conducted by a SOC team of 15,000 and 600,000 analysts, this solution provides:

Early threat detection: Fresh and extensive data expands the threat spectrum for attack prevention. Reduce the risk of incidents: Being informed about the most relevant malicious indicators minimizes the likelihood of incidents. Operational stability: Disruptive downtime is prevented and enterprise sustainability is ensured.

TI feeds provide quantifiable results throughout the SOC process

By providing information related to SIEM, EDR/XDR, TIP, or NDR, TI Feeds expand your threat coverage and provide businesses like yours with actionable insights into recent attacks.

Results: Up to 58% more threats detected, reducing potential business interruption.

2. Protect analysts from false positives

As a CISO, one of the most effective things you can do to reduce burnout and improve SOC performance has to do with the day-to-day work of analysts, rather than overall management.

Analysts will get better results if they can stay focused on real threats and actually do the important work. However, false positives, duplication, and other noise in threat data can lead to data exhaustion. This slows down response times and increases the risk of missing incidents.

Unlike other feeds with largely outdated and unfiltered metrics, ANY.RUN’s TI Feed provides verified intelligence with a near-zero false positive rate and real-time updates. IPs, domains, and hashes are verified and 99% unique.

TI feeds facilitate early detection with the latest indicators available through API/SDK and STIX/TAXII integration

Integrating TI feeds into your stack means:

Take resource-efficient actions against threats to mitigate breaches Avoid workflow disruptions and costly escalations Improve SOC team performance, morale, and impact

Results: Tier 1 to Tier 2 escalations decreased by 30%, increasing productivity across each tier of SOC analysts.

3. Shorten the gap between knowing and doing

A mature SOC moves quickly from detection to response. This requires context. This is something that regular threat intelligence lacks. Without sufficient insight into malicious behavior, investigations across multiple resources can take significant time and effort, increasing the likelihood of operational downtime.

How TI Feeds Benefit SOCs Across the Hierarchy

TI feeds address the gap between alerts and actions. Reduce MTTD and MTTR to help your business with operational context from real-world sandbox analysis conducted by over 15,000 security teams around the world.

Reduce the impact of large-scale breaches by enriching metrics with real attacker behavior from active campaigns. Prevent incident escalation caused by uncertainty and verification delays in the early stages of an investigation. Maintain operational continuity by expediting investigation of attacks before they impact core business processes.

Results: Average response time decreased by 21 minutes, reducing incident response costs.

conclusion

Prioritizing relevant threat intelligence, closing operational gaps, and improving the overall triage-to-response workflow directly impacts the overall SOC performance rate. For CISOs, this has translated into a clear priority. This means providing analysts with a unique, actionable, and relevant threat intelligence feed to take targeted actions to reduce dwell time and enable faster, more confident decision-making.