The cyber Counterintelligence process: A conceptual overview and theoretical proposition

With the ineffectiveness of the defensive cyber security toolkit against advanced threats now commonly accepted, the quest is intensifying for viable and practical alternatives. While Cyber Counterintelligence (CCI) is gaining traction as such an approach, it is still in its infancy as a field of academic enquiry. This paper aims to contribute to an area largely underexplored, namely the conceptual structuring of the CCI process. The paper argues a proposition on the CCI process to be of critical academic and practical importance. On an academic level, such a proposition serves as a notional concept for directing and delineating further research into CCI. On a practical level, the conceptual outline of the process provides an organising template for performing CCI work in practice. On both accounts the proposition is an idealisation - where the CCI process appears to be optimally effective and where everything goes as planned. The paper is based on the premise that CCI can only be performed effectively as part of a multi-disciplinary Counterintelligence (CI) process. Moving from this premise, a contextual overview is provided of some existing postulations on the Intelligence, CI and CCI processes. Since existing propositions do not sufficiently explain CCI, an alternative process model is presented in the form of a diagram and a narrative conceptual outline. The aim is not to describe the process in detail, but to rather present a high-level theoretical framework.