Inside Cyber Intelligence: Exploring the Global Cyber Threat Landscape and US Cyber Policy

Small World, Big Problems

Cyber operations are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as a means for nation state and non-nation state actors to engage in intelligence collection, subversion, and strategic competition more broadly. As our world becomes more thoroughly networked and as more data travels throughout cyberspace, the potential power of cyber operations and the urgency of cyber security grow exponentially. Cyberspace has increasingly become a heated, persistent domain of competition between nation state and non-nation state actors alike, and both the US government and private sector are working feverishly to increase their capacity to understand it and operate within it.

Luke Litle sits down with Prof. Andrew Boyd, who recently retired as the director of the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) and is now serving as an adjunct professor in the Alperovitch Institute at JHU SAIS. They discuss his transition from the human intelligence field to cyber intelligence, the ways US competitors and adversaries are using cyber tools to advance their national interest, current US efforts to develop and define its own cyber policy, the fusion of public and private sector cyber security efforts, and opportunities to serve in the cyber realm within the US government and private sector.