book can help with building guidelines to help you create a CI-DR program tailored to your organization and help build its charter and boundaries.3 It is important to identify the formal boundaries for a CI-DR program due to all the interconnective functions and collection methods that a CI-DR program can touch.
4 Organizations and individuals should consider cyber counterintelligence and cyber deception programs if they already have a mature cybersecurity strategy aligned with business objectives.
5 Cyber counterintelligence programs can be tasked with identifying faint digital signals being used in your organization to view information that has been deemed sensitive.
6 A CI-DR program with all of its functions and capabilities can help business leaders gain better decision-making knowledge about running a business today.
NOTES
1 1 US Government, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 2-Intelligence, (GAO) 1997.
2 2 Ibid.
3 3 US Government, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 2-Intelligence, (GAO) 1997.
4 4 Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Doctrine Division, MCWP 2-14 Counterintelligence, 2 May 2016, https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/MCWP%202-6%20W%20Erratum%20Counterintelligence.pdf
CHAPTER 2 Importance of Cyber Intelligence for Businesses
Our knowledge of circumstances has increased, but our uncertainty, instead of having diminished, has only increased. The reason of this is that we do not gain all our experience at once, but by degrees; so our determinations continue to be assailed incessantly by fresh experience; and the mind, if we may use the expression, must always be under arms.
– Carl von Clausewitz, Prussian general
WE READ PREVIOUSLY that the CI-DR™ program has two objectives and a few tasks that create the interactions and the “connective tissue” between both command (leadership) and operations; its primary objective is to support decision-making by reducing uncertainty.1 The traditional intelligence axiom of “knowledge is power” is the goal of the CI-DR program and that knowledge needs to support critical business decisions, specifically in our digital and cyber working environment. As a regularly attending contributor to a few boards of directors and as an advisor to other boards, the one area of concern I continue to identify is that many cybersecurity or IT security programs lack the business risk information with proper analysis when presenting to boards. This analysis and reporting of cyber risk requires the information provided to be articulated for discussion, be clearly understood by business executives, and be able to be debated in business terms with reinforceable facts to support the decisions made. How many readers of this book have been presented with technology vulnerabilities, only to see numbers and not understand the real intent or criticality of the information being presented? A CI-DR program provides businesses with the relevant information needed to make decisions. Do not think of providing vulnerabilities metrics as a negative report, but understand that it needs to be transformed into a report that is informing the business leader that a decision has to be made. That decision can be that we need to update our systems, the technology teams need time to reboot or restore a critical system, or that we will lose revenue due to particular identified compromises in that system. Reporting from cyber metrics to business has to be made clearer to those making decisions, and to those readers who are reporting vulnerabilities. Our CI-DR program cyber intelligence life cycle can be used to support how the functions and capabilities drive decision-making processes. The dissemination portion that produces the reporting or options is done without obfuscation of why those vulnerabilities being reported are important for the business leader to make decisions whether to ignore or action the report. (See Figure 2.1.)
The CI-DR program objectives provide an organization with guidance to assist in building a formal charter for the program, which can build rational processes of how the cyber data enters the life cycle and how analysis processes transform raw data to become “knowledge” and produce appropriate reporting in business terms. There is a ton of reporting being done today around cyber but most of it is done reactively and at the tactical level, meaning no business decisions are being made, and the information being reported is only valuable for use by a chief information security officer (CISO) or chief information officer (CIO) and is only used to make technology risk decisions. While this type of information is still valuable to the technician, as a risk or business leader you can most likely only use these tactical-level metrics and reporting as a way to find key performance indicators. The data or information at this stage in the cyber intelligence life cycle is still raw and provides no indicators of risk or useful information to business leaders.
FIGURE 2.1 CI-DR™ Cyber intelligence life cycle.
We talk a lot about leveraging tradition intelligence concepts and processes within this book and our CI-DR cyber intelligence life cycle is a direct offspring of one of those concepts. Similar to traditional descriptions of the types of intelligence, the CI-DR types of cyber intelligence do not require much change to the definition or require advanced degrees in cybersecurity; it is, in fact, simplistic in nature. The two primary classes of the CI-DR cyber intelligence are “descriptive cyber intelligence” and “estimative cyber intelligence.” Descriptive cyber intelligence has two components. “Basic cyber intelligence,” which is the general background knowledge about established and relatively constant cyber conditions, is often encyclopedic in nature and often mundane. This information is easiest to gather, and is often available through open sources.2 Basic cyber intelligence is usually not decisive in nature, like providing vulnerability metrics without analysis and trends. Descriptive cyber intelligence also includes “current cyber intelligence,” which is concerned with describing the existing cyber situation. The differentiator between basic and current cyber intelligence is that current cyber intelligence describes more changeable factors. For example, if the organization has identified vulnerabilities within a certain system, but nothing yet has occurred to impact or exploit that system, this is basic cyber intelligence. However, if there is an exploit that leads to a compromise of the system from that identified vulnerability, this would be considered current cyber intelligence as the existing situation changed, and the intelligence is more time-sensitive for making a decision.
The second class of the CI-DR cyber intelligence is known as “estimative cyber intelligence,” and is focused on potential developments. Estimative cyber intelligence is the most demanding and is the most important task of creating “knowledge” from raw digital intelligence, as it seeks to anticipate a possible future or several futures.3 Just as military commanders cannot reasonably expect traditional estimative intelligence to precisely predict the future, estimative cyber intelligence deals with the realm of possibilities and probabilities. It is inherently the less reliable of the classes of intelligence because it is not based on what actually is or has been, but rather on what might occur.4 A good example of estimative cyber intelligence is described in our real-world example in the Introduction.
As we continue to describe the types of cyber intelligence used in our CI-DR framework and program, it is important for the reader to understand that efforts to provide “knowledge” and decisions are complicated by the ability to assess
