Intelligence Services
INFORMATION WARFARE
Competitive intelligence has moved from marketing data into complex compilation and analysis of raw information with the focus striking at the heart of information warfare: information systems. The goal is to determine what a corporation can do - and not what it wants to do.
Europe has two potential conflicts - deregulation and the year 2000 data change problem - that will both be targets for information warfare.
So, intelligence agents monitor newsgroups and discussion room for stray information. "Spoofing ha s become a common method of deception. The e-mailer creates a false ID on thee-mail and goes through an anonymous remailer, and if the reader doesn't check the complete header information, he will only see the spoofed ID. More than once, this was worked to pry specific information from a targeted contact.
Next is "dumpster diving". These are late night trips to the dustbins looking for passwords or sensitive information.
Sophisticated agents have developed a program, similar to the one used by America's National Security Agency, that pulls ghost images off erased hard drives and data disks.
Hackers are considered, by security experts, as last of the list of security threats.
John Smith, senior criminal investigator, for the computer crime unit in California's Silicon Valley, consistently handles numerous corporate espionage and theft of trade secrets cases. He claims that a corporation is less likely to be victimised if it:
- has analyzed the major threats to the organization and considered how to deal with them,
- has planned how it will react to intrusions and losses,
- encourages the reporting of suspicious incidents and has a method in place that makes reporting easy and confidential,
- attempts to recover its stolen material,
- makes it known that offenders will be prosecuted,
- realizes that the major threat is probably from a person authorized to be on the premises,
- has adopted security policies to protect its systems and data,
- makes its security policies known to all who work in the organization.
Military intelligence (abbreviated MI, int. [Commonwealth], or intel. [U.S.]), is a military discipline that focuses on the gathering, analysis, protection, and dissemination of information about the enemy, terrain, and weather in an area of operations or area of interest. Intelligence activities are conducted at all levels from tactical to strategic, during peacetime and in war.
Most militaries maintain a military intelligence corps with specialized intelligence units for collecting information in specific ways. Militaries also typically have intelligence staff personnel at each echelon down to battalion level. Intelligence Officers and enlisted soldiers assigned to military intelligence may be selected for their analytical abilities or scores on intelligence tests. They usually receive formal training in these disciplines.
Strategic intelligence
Strategic intelligence is concerned with broad issues such as economics, military capabilities of foreign countries, and political assessments. Relevant changes may be scientific, technical, tactical, or diplomatic, but these changes are analyzed in combination with known facts about the area in question, such as geography, demographics, and industrial capacities.