Threats today evolve faster than most organizations can track them. In the first half of 2025 alone, our team observed an 800% surge in infostealer activity, a 246% increase in vulnerability disclosures, and a steady rise in threat actors exploiting both cyber and physical environments to gain an advantage.
Against this backdrop, intelligence teams are being asked to do more than monitor. They must answer critical questions in real time to stay a step ahead: Are we exposed? What’s the impact? How should we respond?
However, despite unprecedented access to data, most organizations still can’t answer those fundamental questions with confidence in a timely manner. They rely on static intelligence feeds that are broad but lack depth. They surface vast quantities of indicators and alerts, but much of that information is generic, outdated, or disconnected from an organization’s specific challenges and missions.
That gap leaves executives guessing when they should be acting.
Consider the kinds of questions that might be critical to your mission’s success:
- Is this threat actor targeting our brand, or just mentioning it in passing?
- Who is coordinating this disinformation campaign, and how far has it spread?
- What does this post on a private forum suggest about physical threats to our regional offices?
- What new TTPs are fraud actors testing in non-English-speaking Telegram clusters?
Static collection can’t answer those questions. Its sources are fixed, cadence slow, and context limited.
Without the ability to reshape collection around defined requirements, critical gaps remain. Closed or invite-only communities go unmonitored, and fast-moving threats are missed because collection cadences are not adaptive. Analysts are left with generic context that is detached from the business decisions it is meant to inform.
A modern approach, called Primary Source Collection (PSC), closes those gaps. Rather than starting with a predefined list of sources or topics, PSC begins with the intelligence requirements and works backwards with specific questions in mind. By enabling teams to collect directly from the original sources where those answers live, PSC ensures that every insight is timely, specific, and mission-relevant.
Making Intelligence Taskable
Traditional intelligence programs were built on static models: prepackaged streams of data that reflect a provider’s collection priorities rather than the organization’s own. These models operate like autopilot: reliable but rigid.
While teams receive a steady flow of indicators that confirm known activity, they too often miss the emerging signals that truly matter. Analysts spend valuable hours triaging irrelevant data while early warnings slip past unnoticed. The issue isn’t skill—it’s the collection model they’re using.
Intelligence tradecraft in classified environments has long addressed this challenge through tasking: every collection effort begins with a clearly defined requirement. Priorities drive collection, not the other way around.
Primary Source Collection applies that same discipline to commercial and open-source intelligence. It transforms collection from a fixed feed into an adaptable capability that shifts focus, extends access, and delivers relevant insight on demand. Analysts start with intent—determining what needs to be known, identifying where that information lives, and adjusting tasking as conditions change.
This approach treats collection as an operational function that organizations can shape around their mission needs. External providers become extensions of the team’s workflow, not static content suppliers.
For intelligence leaders, that shift is a force multiplier. By starting with precise requirements and building collection from the ground up, this model enables analysts to:
- Control visibility into emerging risks instead of relying on preset vendor priorities.
- Reduce risk by knowing where every data point originated, how it was accessed, and whether it meets governance standards.
- Prove value by linking intelligence outputs directly to mission-critical questions.
- Accelerate analysis with data that’s relevant, timely, and aligned to stakeholder needs.
- Expand impact across business units—from CTI and fraud prevention to brand protection, compliance, and executive security.
How Taskable Collection Works in Practice
This dynamic, end-to-end structure ensures that as stakeholder priorities evolve, whether due to a new campaign, incident, or business need, collection pivots immediately. It treats collection not as a passive feed, but as an operational capability that can be shaped and redeployed in response to real-world shifts.
A taskable collection framework mirrors the agility of modern threats.
- Source discovery: Analysts identify new, relevant sources in real time through a mix of automated tools and analyst-driven discovery.
- Secure access: Controlled environments and vetted identities allow entry into closed or restricted spaces safely and ethically.
- Direct collection: Teams capture original posts, screenshots, files, and discussions from the digital spaces where threat actors operate.
- Processing and enrichment: Techniques like optical character recognition (OCR), entity extraction, and metadata tagging help convert raw data into structured intelligence.
- Delivery and collaboration: Outputs are routed into integrated systems, investigative workflows, or shared directly with stakeholders to accelerate response.
So what does this look like in practice?
A financial institution using PSC recently detected counterfeit checks featuring its brand being shared in underground marketplaces. Because their analysts were directly monitoring those spaces, they flagged the images, traced the sellers, and alerted fraud teams before any customer losses occurred.
The Path Forward
Static feeds will continue to play a role in baseline monitoring, but they can’t keep pace with modern threats.
Primary Source Collection gives intelligence teams the structure and agility to meet that challenge. It aligns collection with purpose, accelerates decision-making, and delivers intelligence that drives outcomes instead of summaries.
As you evaluate your intelligence program, ask:
- Can your team adjust collection based on your organization’s evolving priorities?
- Do you have a defined process for setting and validating intelligence requirements?
- How frequently is tasking updated to reflect new threats or stakeholder needs?
The future of intelligence belongs to organizations that can adapt their collection as quickly as adversaries adapt their tactics. Taskable intelligence makes that possible, transforming visibility into action and speed into impact.
- From Visibility to Velocity: Why Intelligence Needs to Be Taskable - November 15, 2025
