In April 2014, Lockheed Martin revolutionized the cyber defense business by publishing a seminal white paper Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains. This document sparked a new wave of thinking about digital adversaries, specifically, nation-state advanced persistent threat groups (APTs).
The authors of the paper argued that by leveraging the knowledge of how these adversaries operate, cyber defenders “can create an intelligence feedback loop, enabling defenders to establish a state of information superiority which decreases the adversary’s likelihood of success with each subsequent intrusion attempt.” This so-called kill chain model could “describe phases of intrusions, mapping adversary kill chain indicators to defender courses of action, identifying patterns that link individual intrusions into broader campaigns, and understanding the iterative nature of intelligence gathering form the basis of intelligence-driven computer network defense.”
