Flare Joins the Inaugural 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cyber Threat Intelligence

By Bill Bradley, Product Marketing

Gartner just published its first ever Magic Quadrant for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), and Flare joins the field in this segment as one of the 17 vendors selected out of scores of submissions. This marks recognition of the risks posed by identity exposures, the impact identity-focused CTI vendors have on modern security operations, and Flare’s position in a crowded market where approaches vary widely. I am excited to share what sets Flare apart.

Why Flare Owns Identity Exposure

We built Flare to focus on the single most exploited entry point in enterprise security: defeating account takeover driven by identity exposure by monitoring credential theft, session cookie compromise, stealer log intelligence, and the criminal market infrastructure that makes these attacks possible at scale and at machine speed.

Stolen credentials remain the single most common breach action, and the infostealer ecosystem feeding that exposure is larger and more accessible than most organizations realize. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report and the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 put numbers to the problem every security leader already suspects. 

• Per Verizon:
  • Stolen credentials were the leading initial access vector, present in 22% of all breaches analyzed, ahead of phishing and vulnerability exploitation combined
  • In web application attacks specifically, 88% of breaches involved the use of stolen credentials, making it the defining action in that pattern
• Per Microsoft:
  • 80% of initial access vectors used by access brokers are credential-based attacks, reinforcing that stolen identity is the dominant threat vector by a wide margin

This is not a niche or emerging problem. It is the most documented, most consistent, and most preventable entry point in enterprise security.

The Power of Niche

The Gartner CTI Magic Quadrant grades vendors across a broad set of criteria designed to evaluate the full spectrum of threat intelligence capabilities, including physical security intelligence, geopolitical risk, nation-state actor tracking, brand monitoring, and broad coverage across dozens of threat categories. We score where it matters most to the organizations under active attack today.

If your role in the organization includes trying to stop attackers from logging in as your employees or your customers, before you know they have the keys, Flare delivers the most actionable intelligence.

Our dedication means we score differently against a framework that rewards breadth. We have accepted that tradeoff, and our customers agree it is the right decision. We are a niche in the Magic Quadrant, and we cover a very important niche.

Depth Beats Breadth When your Users are on the Line

The CTI market is crowded. Platforms like Recorded Future, ZeroFox, and SOCRadar offer wide coverage across many threat categories. 

When the conversation is specifically about identity exposure, credential compromise, and preventing breach through stolen access, Flare wins, consistently. Flare’s depth of coverage in your highest-risk vector beats broad coverage of lower-probability ones.

We have built native integrations with identity and access management providers including Microsoft Entra and Okta. When Flare surfaces a compromised credential, your team does not just get a notification. The intelligence flows directly into your Identity and Access Management layer, triggering automated remediation without manual handoff. We like to call this “The 2 AM story” at Flare. What happens if a username/password is offered for sale at 2AM on a Saturday? Mid-sized, and even larger enterprises are unlikely to catch it quickly enough. Often, it bleeds into a Monday noon discovery. With Flare, you can automate remediation workflows and prevent a breach.

Organizations across enterprise social media, healthcare, financial services, and other industries protecting hundreds of millions of users trust Flare for exactly this. At that scale, the 2AM story is not hypothetical. It is a daily operational reality.

That is not a feature most broad CTI platforms prioritize because their architecture was designed for a different problem. For our customers, it is the difference between intelligence that populates a dashboard and intelligence that prevents a breach. The organizations that trust Flare to protect their workforce identities and their customer accounts told us clearly what they needed. We built that, and we kept building it.

What We are Hearing from Customers

We hear consistent themes from organizations evaluating the CTI market:

• Legacy vendors have not delivered the value customers expected. 
• Ownership changes across the category have disrupted service quality and support. 
• Features that were acquired rather than built have never fully developed into a platform that security teams use daily. 
• Customers are actively looking for a vendor they can consolidate around, and identity is where that consolidation starts.

There is a real appetite for consolidation in this market. Customers want fewer vendors, cleaner integrations, and intelligence that connects to action rather than generating noise. We believe we picked the right use case to specialize in. Identity exposure, credential compromise, and session theft are the most consequential and most consistently exploited entry points in enterprise security today. We will address additional CTI use cases as we grow, and we will do it the same way we built the identity layer: by going deep before going broad.

Looking Ahead and Our Plans for CTI Innovation

Like any review, Gartner cites challenge areas alongside the strengths. The capabilities flagged reflect where the CTI market is evolving, and where our customers have been pushing us to go. We have been building toward those areas for some time, driven by customer needs and market signals, not analyst frameworks. As a focused and fast-moving company, our roadmap reflects that velocity.

• We are prioritizing identity intelligence, and the timing is right. As AI-native architectures proliferate, non-human identities, service accounts, API tokens, machine credentials, and agentic access will outnumber human ones by orders of magnitude. That attack surface is squarely in our lane. Our graph knowledge structure will connect threat actors, malware families, stealer logs, and harvested credentials into traversable context across billions of data points in real time, changing what is possible for detection and prevention at AI scale.
• Brand protection and finished threat intelligence are not new directions for Flare, as we have had elements of both for years. The MQ sharpened our understanding of where gaps exist relative to enterprise expectations, and we have been closing them well before any analyst report told us to. A dedicated CTI module and expanded brand protection are in active development as the natural continuation of work already underway, not reactive additions.

Flare and the Expanding CTI Segment

Gartner reviewed scores of companies operating in the CTI space, and placed only 17 in the quadrant. Being one of the 17 means Flare should be part of your cybersecurity discussions, budgeting, and evaluations. It is a signal that the depth we have built in a highly specific and critically important use case is recognized at the highest level of market analysis. 

Flare’s development velocity is a competitive advantage. Enhancements are regularly released to customers, with continued investment across the capabilities that matter most to enterprises, MSSPs, and large consumer platforms.

We are always working to improve our platform, with enhancements being released to customers as soon as in the coming weeks. Flare brings development velocity to fuel continued growth of our customer base across enterprises, MSSPs, and large consumer platforms.

Organizations face daily credential exposure. Flare stops it. We are the most complete solution to a specific and increasingly costly problem. The Gartner inclusion confirms we belong in the conversation.