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Abstract: With the ineffectiveness of the defensive cyber security toolkit against advanced threats now commonly accepted, the quest is intensifying for viable and practical alternatives. While Cyber Counterintelligence (CCI) is gaining traction as such an approach, it is still in its infancy as a field of academic enquiry. This paper aims to contribute to an area largely underexplored, namely the conceptual structuring of the CCI process. The paper argues a proposition on the CCI process to be of critical academic and practical importance. On an academic level, such a proposition serves as a notional concept for directing and delineating further research into CCI. On a practical level, the conceptual outline of the process provides an organising template for performing CCI work in practice. On both accounts the proposition is an idealisation - where the CCI process appears to be optimally effective and where everything goes as planned. The paper is based on the premise that CCI can only be performed effectively as part of a multi-disciplinary Counterintelligence (CI) process. Moving from this premise, a contextual overview is provided of some existing postulations on the Intelligence, CI and CCI processes. Since existing propositions do not sufficiently explain CCI, an alternative process model is presented in the form of a diagram and a narrative conceptual outline. The aim is not to describe the process in detail, but to rather present a high-level theoretical framework.
Keywords: cyber counterintelligence, cyber-counterintelligence process, offensive cybersecurity, cyber security
1.Introduction
Key events during 2015 have affirmed the continued deterioration in cyber security and the degree to which the landscape for the foreseeable future will favour the aggressor. There are various reasons perpetuating this trend. One of these is that current security approaches, for the overwhelming part, remain stuck in antiquated processes models which are compliance-driven, defensive in posture and which emphasise technical solutions at the expense of a more holistic approach.
In an endeavour to capitalise on the market demand for alternatives, commercial cyber-security vendors are increasingly drawing on concepts, principles and approaches that have their origin, and have been proven, in state security circles. Terms and marketing slogans that have thus been gaining popularity include "threat intelligence", "cyber intelligence" "cyber threat intelligence" and to a lesser degree "cyber counterintelligence" (Deloitte...