By Sila Özeren Hacioglu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security.
Security teams are drowning in threat intelligence.
Every day brings with it reports of new malware campaigns, novel C2 channels, bespoke evasion tricks, and stealthier persistence methods. These insights are essential for staying ahead of adversaries, but intelligence alone isn’t enough.
Knowing how attackers operate is only half the battle. The real test is proving that your defenses will actually stop them in your own environment. Not in a lab, not on paper, but across your real-world systems, configurations, and users.
For years, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) solutions have helped security teams stay ahead by safely simulating adversary behavior and demonstrating the effectiveness of existing controls. These platforms deliver value, but they’re only as strong as the threat libraries behind them.
The more mature solutions allow custom threat creation, yet building and simulating new attacks takes significant time and expertise. Meanwhile, the sheer volume of emerging threats is outpacing the bandwidth that most teams have to be able to translate this all into executable validation.
AI rewrites that equation. With AI-driven BAS, security teams can now translate a threat intelligence report into a repeatable attack simulation that delivers evidence of exposure or resilience in minutes.
The Bottleneck: Turning Intelligence Into Action
The fact is that for most enterprises, threat intelligence isn’t scarce. Far from it, it’s become overwhelming. Every month, hundreds of technical blogs dissect new malware families, examine attack chains, and parse adversary campaigns. For security teams, the real challenge isn’t access to intelligence but the relentless pace at which it keeps arriving.
Adversaries are moving faster, too. New groups and campaigns emerge across regions, tailoring their malicious tradecraft to specific industries. As Picus Security’s Red Report 2025 shows, attackers now use AI as a kind of co-pilot to accelerate coding, debugging, and refining techniques. The result is a nonstop stream of attack chains, giving adversaries more time to perfect stealthy, persistent methods.
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