Human Intelligence, or HUMINT, is an interpersonal relationship-focused intelligence collection discipline. To be successful at HUMINT requires having strong knowledge in foreign languages, cultural training methods, and tradecraft methodologies.
HUMINT practitioners manage sources who possess access to sensitive national and combatant command information, including business contacts, refugees, casual travellers or subject matter experts.
Importance of Human Intelligence
Human Intelligence, often abbreviated HUMINT, is one of the oldest intelligence disciplines. While SIGINT and IMINT focus on technology-related intelligence gathering methods, HUMINT emphasizes interpersonal communications. HUMINT requires time, training, and extensive tradecraft expertise.
Military operations rely heavily on HUMINT to identify and assess threats in various operational environments and situations. From exploiting sources to gathering social engineering data and conducting battlefield assessments, understanding an adversary’s sociological norms, habits and values is paramount in successfully combatting them.
The Army is charged with protecting its people and assets from cyber threats, using both human intelligence and AI-powered automation as tools to mitigate security risks. While AI and automation can provide great value in mitigating risks, human experts remain essential when dealing with security risks; having a team of security experts trained to identify situations, evaluate situations carefully, consider motivations behind threat actors’ activities, provide insight, provide context.
Alerting potential victims of an impending attack
Some believe that AI will render HUMINT obsolete; however, this belief is false as HUMINT remains one of the key intelligence gathering disciplines.
Human Intelligence (HUMINT) allows intelligence communities to collect intelligence that cannot easily be obtained via satellites or technical methods, providing insight into adversary intentions and plans.
HUMINT can be utilized to gather threat intelligence on various targets, such as underground crime networks, forums/marketplaces/chat platforms etc. Additionally, it can be employed to infiltrate threat actors and comprehend their behavioral patterns.
HUMINT can provide critical intelligence that warns potential victims of an impending cyber attack or detect and stop attacks before they take place. When combined with data gathered through security tools or telemetry systems, human intelligence can provide even greater value; however, HUMINT should never replace human interaction in cyber security: rather, it should complement it.
Validating data collected automated intelligence
Some analysts speculate that OSINT and technological collection methods such as satellites and cyberspace will further diminish HUMINT, yet certain tasks simply cannot be completed without human input.
HUMINT differs from OSINT and SIGINT by being focused on interpersonal contact; its collection involves more of an infusion of information rather than technical processes or feed ingestion. Therefore, building relationships with potential sources takes more time, with those belonging to an adversary organization or network often providing the most thorough intelligence on capabilities, motivations and plans of adversaries.
Clandestine HUMINT involves agents recruited or recruited and foreign nationals working undercover within countries or organizations, infiltrating under a false story to collect political, social, or technical intelligence for their nation’s government. Such agents gain access to internal memos and compartmented data not accessible through technical collection methods and can expose weapons developments before they are adapted by adversaries or discovered through technical collection systems.
Substantiating the attacker’s capabilities
Human Intelligence Gathering (HUMINT) collects intelligence that traditional techniques cannot, such as accessing internal memoranda and compartmented information. Furthermore, its costs compare favorably to most technical systems’ production and technology costs.
First step of human intelligence collection is identifying potential sources. This can be accomplished by evaluating their qualifications, talents, accessibility and motives before recruiting them under official or non-official covers as spies/agents to work as spies/agents or even just to gain information over time. Finally, collectors must form relationships with sources in order to elicit information gradually from them.
Human Intelligence (HUMINT) offers many advantages, yet it remains imperfect. Some issues that often arise during HUMINT collection include cultural miscommunication, use of unreliable methods for intelligence collection and logistical complications.
HUMINT remains one of the key disciplines in national security collection. It ensures that the United States has enough intelligence to protect itself against cyber threats and other types of attacks.
Supporting law enforcement.
HUMINT gathers information from people and feeds it back to law enforcement. HUMINT can enter rooms satellites cannot reach, and talk to individuals that SIGINT cannot wiretap. HUMINT data can help prevent attacks before they occur, or catch those responsible afterward.
HUMINT sources that offer exceptional knowledge include defectors, spies and informants. Securing such sources requires expert recruitment skills – “MICE” (Money Ideology Compromise and Excitement) is often used as an acronym to illustrate what it takes to recruit someone into becoming a spy.
These sources may be scarce, but their information can be immensely beneficial to a commander during the seize initiative phase – where rapidly converging effects must be maximized while protecting force protection and establishing legitimacy with host nation authorities.
These top-tier sources are rare but incredibly invaluable; they offer invaluable insight into adversarial elements’ strengths and weaknesses as well as dispositions, orders of battle and intent of adversarial elements as well as input for battlefield damage assessments. They provide invaluable intelligence input during seize initiative phase when rapid effects must be quickly converged while maximizing force protection while simultaneously creating legitimacy with host nation authorities – all critical information sources necessary to seize initiative phase operations.
4 Common Human Intelligence Cybersecurity
HUMINT remains an integral component of an effective intelligence gathering system, even though its importance has become less prominent over time due to more technical collection disciplines like signals analysis or imagery processing. Human Intelligence allows us to gather additional intelligence beyond our technical capacities.
HUMINT data collection can provide invaluable insights into human elements of cybersecurity threats, providing new understanding about motivations and capabilities of attackers that you cannot find using threat intelligence tools alone.
As threats become increasingly complex, having a team of experts who can offer insights into adversarial motivations, tactics and techniques is becoming ever more vital to effectively defending against cyberattacks and mitigating further attempts in the future. Automated intelligence data combined with this insight is also key.
1. Digital Risk Protection Service
As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, it is vital that cybersecurity staff stay abreast of emerging techniques. While automated tools may assist in detecting attacks and their impacts, cyber HUMINT provides valuable human intelligence gathering capabilities by going into rooms where automation cannot reach and extracting intelligence from threat actors directly.
Cyber HUMINT differs from traditional HUMINT by blending elements of human espionage with digital intelligence collection techniques, enabling practitioners to conduct surveillance on an adversary without risk of being identified as a spy. Instead, collection teams operate under digital identities such as personas or puppets that have believable backstories and motivations curated to increase trustworthiness of sources.
Cyber HUMINT seeks to glean as much information from an adversary, providing a valuable complement to automated sources like forum advertisements or scraping. Furthermore, human intelligence provides additional insight necessary for effectively triaging and responding to an incident such as identifying attackers responsible, verifying information collected by automated tools is accurate, as well as understanding an attacker’s ecosystem, capabilities and motives.
2. Incident response
Human intelligence remains an indispensable asset to military operations against both traditional nation-state adversaries and more serious threats such as terrorist networks or cybersecurity. HUMINT refers to collecting intelligence data using humans both as sources and collectors.
Cyber HUMINT operators use similar tradecraft methodologies as traditional spies do in physical environments; however, their operations tend to be more discreet due to operational environments. Their goal is to elicit information from human sources before passing this on to their handlers for analysis.
Locating human data sources can be challenging, and requires the ability to recognize them based on their qualifications, talents, accessibility and motives. MICE (Money Ideology Credibility Excitement) can serve as a helpful way of recognizing these sources; recruiting these sources requires its own skill set while interrogation must also be executed effectively if relevant information must be collected and documented for eventual eradication. Once this stage has concluded, all involved parties should hold a Post Incident Review (PIR) meeting where everyone involved discusses what went well during this incident while discussing ways they could improve for future incidents.
Cybercriminals are always evolving their attacks, using new techniques and tactics against businesses. The only effective way to stop them is to monitor underground communities and gather HUMINT.
Cyber professionals specialize in setting up cybersecurity systems and updating them as necessary to protect against advanced threats, including altering logs to reduce false alarms.
3. New attack discovery
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field and threat actors find new ways to breach defenses. Security teams rely on intelligence gathered from various sources such as open source intelligence (OSINT), social media intelligence (SOCMINT), and signals intelligence (SIGINT), but all attack information begins with human actors; therefore humans remain an essential component of any cybersecurity program regardless of technological advancements and evolving strategies.
One of the primary human intelligence cybersecurity practices involves determining how and why an attack occurred. Analysts must analyze data from multiple sources, filter out irrelevant details, and create a narrative explaining how an attack took place – often times this will reveal indicators of compromise (IOCs) which alert teams about an active threat.
However, identifying IOCs requires an advanced level of skill. Some attackers utilize imperceivable attacks – which involve altering an illicit image so it appears normal to AI-based detection systems – in attacks requiring high degrees of precision and sophistication. According to Heartfield and Loukas’ recent paper on this subject matter, human security systems outshone technical security systems in this respect due to their ability to recognize manipulated images more quickly.
4. Actor graduation
hackers are constantly finding new ways to break into businesses and steal data, so it’s crucial that modern technologies be combined with tried-and-tested strategies such as Human Intelligence to prevent attacks and minimize their effects.
Cyber intelligence (CI) is an invaluable asset for both threat hunters and incident responders, enabling them to identify and understand threats more quickly. It can come from various sources including open source intelligence (OSINT), machine intelligence and social media intelligence; however, many believe only technology can detect and defend against attacks.
Without human employees to assist, even the best cyber security systems can be overcome by sophisticated attack vectors. Threat actors commonly utilize machine learning techniques to remain undetected by automated detection tools; however, human security analysts possess an intuitive sense for recognizing suspicious activity and quickly flag it for further analysis.
By combining human intelligence and AI, cyber security specialists are better able to recognize, learn, and model the behaviors of threat actors – enabling them to quickly detect attacks faster and defend more accurately against them. They also gain a better understanding of individual actor ecosystems such as capabilities and motivations allowing them to better track activity as well as assess any potential risk to an organization.
Final Thoughts
Cyberattacks continue to evolve and outwit protection systems, but their origin lies with human action. Threat actors rely on intuitive and creative abilities such as intuition to plan attacks that evade automated security systems’ detection systems.
Problematically, observation of human behavior is rarely factored into security analysis tools’ data streams; thus, humans as sensors cannot provide adequate context information needed to make sense of events and determine whether an incident poses harm or not.
HUMINT has long been one of the key intelligence disciplines, providing organizations with critical intelligence necessary for recognizing and combatting even the most sophisticated threats. HUMINT remains one of the oldest disciplines in existence today and continues to transcend technological advancement, cultural shifts and geopolitical eras alike.
Cybersecurity encompasses a comprehensive set of technologies, practices and procedures designed to safeguard networks, programs, devices and data from damage or unauthorized access. Cybersecurity requires continuous improvement to ensure effective security measures are in place and working. Human employees augment AI software types like Machine Learning to complete all the required tasks of an effective cybersecurity system while security professionals optimize these systems according to individual business needs and monitor for new threats.