CII blends basic technical and operational knowledge of the cyber domain with classic intelligence t What is CII?
Introduction
The emergence of cyberspace and its increasingly important role in finance, commerce, communications, industrial control, infrastructure protection—as well as the vulnerabilities in networked systems—require industry, government and academia to work together more effectively to find better solutions to secure the cyber domain. The Institute of World Politics (IWP) created the Cyber In
telligence Initiative (CII), a unique professional education program designed by business leaders and national security experts, to help practitioners and companies better understand how to use intelligence to develop policies and operations that proactively increase security and reduce business risk. IWP’s CII programs focus less on the engineering aspects of cyber security and more on the strategic and operational use of cyber intelligence and its various programs. As countries become more dependent on digital defense, cyber intelligence becomes more fundamental to national security. CII blends basic technical and operational knowledge of the cyber domain with classic intelligence tradecraft in collection and analysis, counterintelligence, active defense, policy creation and risk assessment. CII enables business and government professionals to become better informed about:
- Cyber adversaries—whether state or non-state actors, transnational criminal organizations, commercial competitors, hacktivists, cyber-terrorists, or lone wolf actors.
- Intelligence data—how to use it more proactively to better defend against attacks, increase security more effectively and reduce an organization risks of cyber espionage, theft of intellectual property or other sensitive data, diminished market reputation, or operational disruption.
- Cybersecurity operations—understand cyber operations and its impact to organizations.
- Cybersecurity programs—how to assess and develop cybersecurity programs such as cyber intelligence, insider threat, counter intelligence etc. The goals of CII are to:
- Educate and train a new generation of intelligence analysts to understand why and how an organization becomes a target.
- Teach how the motives and methods of attack can be better understood and managed.
- Show how to leverage threat data that encompasses vulnerabilities and attacks.
- Demonstrate how to turn that data into actionable steps in order to manage risks and more effectively protect the organization.
