A Cyber Counterintelligence Matrix for Outsmarting Your Adversaries

摘要

While cyber counterintelligence (CCI) has been a distinctive specialisation field for state security structures internationally for well over a decade, there has of late been growing recognition of CCI's significance to also non-state actors. CCI is gaining main stream traction and is seen a central to proactively mitigating cyber risk and exploiting opportunities. The cybersecurity vendor Panda Labs (2018), for example, recently observed that CCI has increasingly become "more significant among larger companies." Also for smaller role-players which do not have resources for a fully-fledged capacity, CCI offers a way of thinking and an approach towards more robustly asserting their cyber interests. With the growing recognition of CCI's significance, comes an acknowledgment of its complexity. CCI is not an easy to use add-on or plug-in. It is all about the meticulous outthinking and outwitting of both actual and potential adversaries. This paper advances a matrix that on practical level can serve as a concise, high-level pocket guide' for outsmarting adversaries by means of a robustly configured CCI endeavour. The matrix's uses include (i) guiding the optimal deployment of offensive and defensive tools; (ii) synchronising CCI with broader organisational processes; and (iii) enabling the configuration of a CCI posture most attuned to particular organisations' requirements.