OSINT - New Start, Intelligence Lifecycle
A new beginning
This is the first real start into my journey of diving into OffSec & OSINT, and part of a larger journey of marrying Threat Intelligence, Software Engineering and Security into something cohesive.
I’ll be using this for sharing my knowledge, interests, and walkthrough of things that I find throughout this journey. I’ll also be attempting to break down these concepts as simply as I can. I’m not perfect, but it’s a start. I have no set length for how long or short this articles may or may not be.
They’ll be as long as I feel I suppose.
So first off, a couple of things I didn’t entirely realize:
The “Open” in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) refers directly to how available a given set of information is. In this case, “Open” means exactly as it sounds. Which is ‘available’ in a public sense.
The full scope of the intelligence lifecycle.
So then you’re probably wondering, “okay what is the intelligence lifecycle then?”. Well to keep it simple, It is a process of converting information to intelligence (which are not the same). You can think of intelligence as the product of relevant, time bound, and actionable information put together.
Rather than the gauge of how well I can compute the fibonacci sequence in me brain hole (hint, not very fast).
The process is this:
Planning and Direction - Who’s the target, why are we targeting, when are we researching, etc.
Collection - Actually collecting information. This can take some time, you may hear this as “information gathering” at times
Processing - Taking that data to organize it. You can think of this as kind of like pre-preprocessing (if you come from a data background).
Analysis/Production - Analyzing your data. Also normally where you put things together and build out your report (the intelligence deliverable).
Dissemination - Sharing our intelligence/presenting to relevant parties.
Then it repeats all over again, starting at 1. It’s an iterative process like most other cycles. You may see it as something that looks like this:
Here’s some great resources from the public TCM repository:
I’ll be back soon with the next iteration and set of things learned.