Critical Infrastructure: OSINT to the Rescue...

Over the past decade our U.S. Critical Infrastructure has become even more vulnerable.

Why?

In the early days of the commercial Internet 2000-2001, there were several dozen of us working in a Rosslyn building on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia to answer our growing Fortune 500 and government clients questions of “Who”, “What”, “Where and “How”.

We already knew the answer to “Why”.

The 24/7 Internet crawler algorithms our techies engineered were doing their intended tasks and retrieving Terabytes of data on a 24/7 basis for our further human analysis.

All of this was well on its way before the more sophisticated use cases of the Internet for the implementation of the Banking infrastructure, Retail transactions and Telecommunications were in place.

The systems and infrastructure we now call “Critical”, was just in its early stages of iP maturity.

Remember, the iPhone was not invented until around 2007!

Afterwards and yet even more vital to this day, you might think about your own organizations “Operational Risk Management” (ORM) objectives and tasks into three key categories:

• Human
• Physical
• Cyber

Over the course of your companies legal, compliance and security organizations conducting regular “Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment” (THIRA) activities and rules, the reality begins to set in.

The Board of Directors are still asking, "How can we as people address the exponential growth, change and remediation without more automation, software and systems?"

"This is when new companies were born to build the software to help humans keep a better eye on the risk management of our growing Critical Infrastructure."

As new software companies were born to address THIRA applications, some people began to feel like it all had NOT been solved.

Asymmetric Warfare today, not only includes our “Nation States” across the globe, but also Black hat “Hacktivist” organizations and individual people. In every country with the Internet.

Evidence of these individuals and groups growing existence are still the “Why” for your own organizations THIRA activities.

This also includes the “Why” for our US Homeland Security organizations such as CISA and others in the National Intelligence and Law Enforcement arenas.

Perhaps even more vital, are the private organizations who are still in the business today of “Open Source Intelligence” (OSINT) since the dawn of the Internet…