What Is Extended Threat Intelligence (XTI)?

Traditional threat intelligence was built for the SOC. It tracks IP addresses, malware hashes, CVEs, and indicators of compromise. This intelligence is essential for defending networks — and it covers about a third of the threats facing a modern organization.

The other two-thirds — physical threats, reputational attacks, executive targeting, disinformation campaigns, and societal risks — exist outside the cyber intelligence framework entirely.

Extended threat intelligence (XTI) is the model that covers all of it.

Why “Extended”?

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) was the original category. It emerged from the information security community to address network-level threats with network-level indicators. CTI platforms ingest technical threat data, correlate it against known threat actor behavior, and produce intelligence that SOC analysts use to defend infrastructure.

XTI doesn’t replace CTI. It extends the intelligence framework beyond the cyber domain to include every threat category that affects organizational security.

What XTI Adds to CTI

Physical security intelligence. Threats of violence, workplace violence indicators, facility targeting, protest coordination, and event-related risks. These threats originate on social media and messaging platforms, not in network traffic logs.

Reputation intelligence. Brand impersonation, disinformation campaigns, narrative manipulation, and coordinated attacks on organizational credibility. These manifest across social media, forums, review sites, and web content.

Executive protection intelligence. Personal information exposure on data brokers, social media targeting of executives, credential compromise, and family member exposure. This is personal-level intelligence that CTI platforms don’t address.

Societal and geopolitical intelligence. Civil unrest, political instability, regulatory changes, and conflict indicators that affect operations, supply chains, and personnel safety. This intelligence comes from news, social media, and government sources in local languages.

Legal and compliance intelligence. Regulatory changes, litigation activity, and compliance violations that create organizational risk. These signals surface in news, government publications, and legal databases.

XTI in Practice

An XTI platform monitors across multiple data layers — surface web, social media, dark web, domain registries, credential databases — and classifies incoming signals across multiple risk domains simultaneously. The result is a unified threat picture that converges intelligence from every domain.

The Convergence Example

Consider this scenario: a threat actor researches an executive on social media (reconnaissance). They post the executive’s home address on a forum (doxing). They express violent intent in a follow-up post (threat leakage). And their email address appears in a recent credential breach database (cyber exposure).

In a CTI-only model, maybe the credential breach gets detected — if the executive’s email happens to be in scope. The social media reconnaissance, doxing, and threat leakage are invisible to a cyber-focused platform.

In an XTI model, all four signals are classified against their respective risk domains — Cyber Risk, Crime Risk, Physical Security — and the platform recognizes them as the same entity across domains. The converging threat picture surfaces automatically, not through manual analyst cross-referencing across separate tools.

Multi-Domain Classification

The technical requirement for XTI is a classification engine that operates across risk domains simultaneously. Content shouldn’t be classified as “cyber” or “physical” — it should be classified against every relevant domain at once. A social media post that contains both a threat (Physical Security) and reveals compromised credentials (Cyber Risk) should trigger classification in both domains.

DigitalStakeout’s platform architecture is built on the XTI model, classifying incoming signals across 14 risk domains with 225+ specific threat scenarios. This provides the convergent, multi-domain intelligence view that single-domain platforms structurally cannot.

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