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The CTIIC rises

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 27 Feb 2015, 11:31am

The CTIIC rises

All this because somebody at Sony thought a comedy about killing a dictator would be a great idea.

Shockwaves from the Sony Pictures hack are still reverberating throughout the US. Decades from now, we might be looking at the Sony Pictures hack as one of the most pivotal moments in cyber terrorism/ crime history as it finally opened everybody's eyes on how serious a breach in digital security could be. It spawned furious security overhaul everywhere as well as creation of new protocols and measures to prevent a similar breach.

One of those measures is the establishment of the CTIIC (Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center). The CTIIC is America's newest tool in its arsenal of agencies. Or rather, it will be. While the announcement of the intent of its creation was made on the tenth of this month, it was only yesterday that President Obama issued a memorandum that officially declared its creation. The CTIIC will sit as liaison between all the different agencies.

Any information gathered by the other agencies pertaining to cyber security matters will be collated by the CTIIC and then dispersed throughout the different governmental organizations. The lack of inter-agency cooperation is a point regularly raised in governmental reviews, with the lack of communication between all the separate federal organizations usually cited as  one of the reasons the 9/11 attacks were successful. That was negated with the creation of the NCC (National Counter-terrorism Center) but the NCC only covers the physical world. With the creation of the CTIIC, the digital world is now covered too.

As befitting its intermediary nature, the CTIIC won't be a large organization. It's currently planned to have around 50 employees and a budget of only $35 million per year. In comparison, the CIA's budget (as of 2013) is estimated to be about 15 billion. The CTIIC also won't be conducting its own operations, instead, the nature of its job is to simply disseminate information so that all the relevant agencies have actionable intelligence that come from other agencies which might have been previously ignored.

While this will probably mean more inter-agency cooperation, we can't help but wonder if more bureaucracy is really the answer. The NSA already has its own group of cyber specialists (with some devastating software at their disposal), as do the CIA, FBI and the other agencies. Adding a new one instead of consolidating the cyber divisions of the various agencies seems like it adds more to the overall scheme of things instead of making it easier.

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