Most threat intel reports bury the recommendation on page 8. By page 8, your CISO already closed the tab.
I built CyberBRIEF because I got tired of writing reports nobody reads. It’s an automated tool that researches a threat topic across multiple sources, pulls out indicators of compromise, maps everything to MITRE ATT&CK, and delivers it all in a clean BLUF briefing with proper citations. The whole point is getting the answer to the top of the page.
Put the Answer First
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) comes from military and intelligence writing. The idea is dead simple: lead with the conclusion, then back it up with evidence.
Traditional reports build toward a recommendation. BLUF reports start with one. The reader knows in the first paragraph whether they need to act. Everything after that is the “why.”
This matters a lot in security. When a new vulnerability drops or a threat actor campaign shows up, the SOC lead doesn’t have 20 minutes to read background before finding out if they’re at risk. They need the answer now. CyberBRIEF generates exactly that structure: a concise BLUF paragraph up top, followed by categorized findings, IOC tables, ATT&CK mappings, and sourced citations.
One Source Isn’t Enough
Every single threat intel source has coverage bias. A vendor’s blog pushes threats their product catches. Government advisories focus on critical infrastructure. An independent researcher goes deep on the technical side but misses the broader campaign.
CyberBRIEF fans out queries to multiple providers: Brave Search for broad web coverage, Perplexity for synthesized research, and Google Gemini for analytical processing. Each returns different perspectives on the same threat.
The aggregation pipeline doesn’t just concatenate results. It deduplicates overlapping findings, identifies consensus (if three independent sources flag the same IOC, that carries more weight), and flags contradictions for review. The goal: a comprehensive picture without making the reader visit six websites and merge everything in their head.
Pulling IOCs and Mapping to ATT&CK
Indicators of compromise are scattered through prose paragraphs in every threat report. IP addresses, domains, file hashes, CVE identifiers. Manually extracting them is tedious and you will miss things.
CyberBRIEF automates extraction with regex patterns plus contextual validation. An IPv4 address in a “Contact Us” footer is not the same as one identified as a C2 server. The extractor uses surrounding context to classify each IOC.
The ATT&CK mapping was the hardest feature to get right. If a briefing identifies that a threat actor uses spearphishing attachments (T1566.001) for initial access and scheduled tasks (T1053.005) for persistence, a defender can immediately check whether their detection rules cover those techniques.
The system maintains a local reference of technique descriptions and uses semantic matching to identify relevant techniques. Every mapping includes the technique ID, name, tactic category, and the specific evidence that triggered it. A mapping without justification is just a guess.
Citations Actually Matter
This sounds minor. It’s not.
CyberBRIEF generates citations in Chicago Notes-Bibliography format. Every claim traces back to a specific source. If a briefing says APT29 shifted to a new infrastructure pattern, the reader needs to know if that comes from a Mandiant report, a CISA advisory, or a random blog post. The source changes how much weight you give the finding.
Chicago NB was a deliberate choice over APA or MLA. It’s the standard in intelligence and policy writing. Footnote-style citations keep the body readable while full attribution lives in the notes. CyberBRIEF generates these automatically, so nobody has to manually format a bibliography ever again.
The Frontend
React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS. I built five visual variants to explore different approaches to presenting intelligence data. The interface handles topic submission, shows real-time research progress, and renders the final briefing with interactive elements. IOC tables are sortable and filterable. ATT&CK mappings link to official MITRE pages. HTML export produces a self-contained file for email or archive. Markdown export plugs into wikis.
The biggest design lesson: in intelligence products, the most important information needs to be visually dominant. Supporting details should be accessible but not competing for attention. Color and spacing do heavy lifting when someone is scanning under time pressure.
What Broke, What Stuck
The gap between having information and having actionable intelligence is enormous. Most of the work is in the translation layer. API integration and text extraction were real challenges, but the harder problem was always: “How do I present this so a busy human can make a decision in 30 seconds?”
Building the ATT&CK mapping engine taught me more about the framework than any certification course could. When you have to correctly classify adversary behaviors into specific techniques, you learn fast where the boundaries between similar techniques actually are.
The multi-source architecture was a crash course in API rate limiting, response normalization, and the reality that different providers return wildly different data structures for the same query. Resilient aggregation pipelines are their own discipline.
CyberBRIEF is the tool I wish existed when I started studying threat intelligence. Not because the information isn’t available. Because the time cost of gathering, organizing, and formatting it is a barrier that keeps useful analysis from reaching the people who need it.