Better Late Than Never
The global risks impacting the everyday activities of home, school, work, and life has reprioritized, in the minds of many Americans, what it means to be able to keep ourselves safe and our loved ones protected. As a result, schools, businesses, and organizations across the United States have turned to protective intelligence to help reduce risk and prevent violence.
Protective Intelligence is the process by which dedicated teams of protectors proactively identify, assess, and then ultimately work to manage a known threat away from harmful outcome. It is a practice which was historically reserved for only the most prominent of protected persons i.e.; royalty; presidents; and prime ministers who could afford to have the resources of their own government directed toward keeping themselves protected. More recently, this practice has become a cornerstone of big business who have learned to see proactive security not as a cost, but as a force multiplier.
A Growth Industry
As America begins the return to normalcy, Protective Intelligence services are expected to be one of the most sought-after resources as schools, businesses and organizations of all sizes strive to improve how they stay safe. Even though most organizations may never experience a high-level threat — and therefore may not require the skillset and capability of a protective entity to be maintained in-house — many have chosen to outsource their protective intelligence needs to a dedicated service provider. Thereby allowing the business to rest assured they have a trusted resource in place well before they realize they need them.
A key benefit of an out-sourced protective intelligence program is that it removes bias and inter-personal influence from the collection and assessment process, and provides for a dispassionate and impartial evaluation of which concerns should be given priority.
Another advantage is that employees are much more likely to submit a concern, an observation, or even an insight to an outside party who they do not interact with every day, but who they know is a trusted voice and has a regular audience with the decision makers.
Duty of Care
What is most important for the everyday business owner, school administrator, and HR manager to understand, is that while one small component of protective intelligence is to help you to reduce risk and prevent violence, the overarching takeaway of the intelligence is to provide you with the best intelligence possible so that you can make the most informed decisions to help your company, business, organization or school to be as successful as possible.
So, if you’re a school who is planning on having an assembly before the holiday break, and the focus is going to be on staying safe while shopping online, what a protective intelligence program may provide is a key insight on something that has been trending throughout the student body. As the holidays approach, and there is suddenly a sharp increase in tone and talking points on the topic of depression, a school administrator may decide it is in the best interest of the students to pivot the focus of the assembly away from cyber security and more toward the reality of seasonal affective disorders, holiday depression, and suicide prevention.
Students at North Kingstown High School in Rhode Island attend an assembly on cyberbullying. Photo Credit: Cyberbullying Research Center
The Realistic Risk of Insider Threats
An insider threat is a malicious threat to an organization which originates from people inside the organization, such as employees, former employees, contractors or business associates who have intimate insight and information concerning the organization's security practices.
For those who wish to do harm, the single most influential factor of target selection is “likelihood of success.” This is why insider threats always pose a greater risk of harm than outside actors. Students attack their schools, and workers attack their offices because that is often where: the initial grievance is born; where the ideation that they can “do something about it” is first nurtured; and where the “research and planning” for their attack can often be disguised as day-to-day activity.
Just last week, lawyers representing Tesla filed the requisite paperwork to sue a former employee, accusing him of industrial espionage, trade secret theft, and breach of contract. Tesla has accused the former software engineer of downloading about 26,000 sensitive files in his first week. Had those protective intelligence safeguards not been in place to alert Tesla to such a breach of trust, the cost of Tesla finding out only after those secrets had been sold could have been in the billions of dollars.
Photo Credit via @Shutterstock
Raw Intel Is Just That: Raw
“We’re going to kill them. Destroy them. We will not let them get away with this. After what they said last week, we cannot let this stand. So let’s go out there and show everyone in this town exactly who we are!”
Is that language cause for concern? It certainly could be.
If that language was posted to a Facebook page of an alt-right militia movement ahead of a Black Lives Matter rally, it would most certainly be cause for concern.
But what if that same language came from the text message of a high school quarterback who was responding to his dad asking him what his coach said to the team in the locker room that had them all so fired up before the big game? Well, that changes the context, doesn’t it?
In order for intelligence to become actionable, it needs to be properly assessed, managed, vetted, and verified. This means that just because someone tweets out an emotional outburst which could be construed as a threat, does not mean it is immediately worthy of having every available resources deployed in its direction. Nor does it mean that if a concern is found to be warranted, that all of those available resources will not be brought to bear.
What it does mean is that each and every concern should be assessed, vetted, and managed in a tried and true fashion by a capable team of knowledgable professionals who can then prescribe a best course of action. Fears will always be bigger than budgets, which is why the ideal protective intelligence team is not only capable of making a timely assessment, but is equally capable of making recommendations for how an organization’s limited resources can be allocated in the most effective manner possible.
Interpreting intelligence is no different that interpreting language. Just as good interpreter is intimately familiar with the idioms, slang, and the relevance of local lingo in the person they are translating for, so, too, is there a need for protective intelligence to be processed in such a way that it becomes most relevant to whomever is on the receiving end of the assessment.
My Conversation with Stefanie Drysdale
In this week’s podcast I had the pleasure of speaking with Stefanie Drysdale, the Vice President of Cyber for Prescient -- a global risk management firm specializing in intelligence, due diligence, investigations, and cybersecurity.
Stefanie and I discussed a number of topics impacting today’s security environment, but we kept circling back to one key theme: the importance of protective intelligence.
We had a very dynamic discussion, touching on many facets of industry interest. Stefanie is a treasure-trove of knowledge and insight, and I think you will find some very valuable take-aways from our conversation.
Onward. Upward.
Work. Sweat. Win.
—Spencer Coursen
