## Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP)

A **TIP** is the heart of a CTI program. It is where you aggregate, analyze, and disseminate intelligence. Without a TIP, you are just managing Spreadsheets of Death.

### Core Functions of a TIP

#### 1. Maximum Aggregation
You have 50 sources of intel:
*   Paid Feeds (CrowdStrike, Mandiant).
*   Open Source Feeds (AlienVault OTX, Abuse.ch).
*   ISAC Emails (Financial-ISAC).
*   Twitter APIs.
A TIP sucks all of these in automatically via API.

#### 2. Normalization & Deduplication
If CrowdStrike reports `IP: 1.2.3.4` as "Cobalt Strike" and AlienVault reports `IP: 1.2.3.4` as "Scanning", you don't want two rows in your database.
The TIP merges these into one "Object" with two "tags".

#### 3. Enrichment (Context)
When an indicator arrives, the TIP asks questions automatically:
*   **VirusTotal**: "What is the detection ratio?"
*   **Whois**: "When was this domain registered?"
*   **Passive DNS**: "What domains resolved to this IP in the past?"
This saves the analyst 20 minutes of manual searching per indicator.

#### 4. Dissemination (Integration)
The most important part.
*   **SIEM**: Push High Confidence IOCs to Splunk for detection.
*   **Firewall**: Push High Confidence IPs to the Edge Firewall for blocking.
*   **SOAR**: Trigger a playbook to scan endpoints for a file hash.

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### The TIP Ecosystem
The TIP sits in the middle.
*   **Input**: Feeds -> TIP
*   **Output**: TIP -> SIEM / Firewall / EDR.

> 💡 **Pro Tip**: Never push "Raw Feed" data directly to a Firewall. You block Google DNS by mistake once, and you lose your job. Always filter through a TIP first.