By Chelsea Conard, Cyber Threat Report Analyst
The Cyber Threat Alliance’s (CTA) Joint Analytic Reports (JAR) are a superb example of resilience through collaboration. The CTA is uniquely positioned to unite cybersecurity industry leaders and foster knowledge sharing for a stronger, collective defense. This collaborative effort not only enhances individual capabilities but also fortifies the entire community, ensuring that no one faces cybersecurity challenges alone.
In Cyber Threats to NGOs, the CTA community partnered with several other non-governmental organizations (NGO) to address the cybersecurity challenges NGOs face and identify areas where the broader community can offer support. A key objective of a JAR is to ensure that insights and messaging are rooted in data, where the CTA’s shared intelligence will tell the story and reveal patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. However, this collaboration highlighted a critical finding: the NGO community faces a significant lack of accessible cybersecurity data. Unlike what is more commonplace in threat intelligence, NGOs often do not have the data needed for comprehensive analysis.
In our first working committee meeting, it became clear that this data gap was a major obstacle. Thus, we united to focus on how best to articulate the necessary infrastructure and steps to navigate the cybersecurity landscape for NGOs. As our work progressed and the JAR took shape, our collective efforts produced a vital resource for NGOs. This resource not only empowers them to tackle their cybersecurity challenges, but also amplifies their voice to ensure that their needs and challenges are clearly communicated within the CTA community. By addressing this dearth of data, we also aspire to equip NGOs with the insights needed to collect and analyze NGO-specific cybersecurity data to build lasting resilience against common threats.
In a similar vein, our recent addition to the Olympics Threat Assessment, focused on the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, underscores the importance of collective knowledge to stay informed with timely intelligence. This supplement to our previous Tokyo Olympic report adapts to the evolving threat landscape, addressing specific risks associated with the Paris Games and providing a comprehensive perspective on the wide array of potential threats. Internally, we strengthened our communications and partnerships by establishing a dedicated channel to swiftly share intelligence during the Games.
We are excited to now have a current working group of CTA members, partners, and allies focused on a JAR dedicated to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). This report stands out on an emerging topic by harnessing the combined intelligence of the CTA community to cut through the hype surrounding AI. The report aims to leverage data and existing expertise to ground the narrative in reality as it covers the adversarial use of AI and how to build resilience against this emerging threat vector.
It has been an honor to lead these collaborations and support the CTA mission to improve the cybersecurity of our global digital ecosystem by enabling high-quality sharing among companies and organizations. The process to brainstorm and produce the JARs with the CTA community has demonstrated to me the transformative power of collaboration. I see us building resiliency together through our mutual learning among community members, in how our consensus-driven approach shares key insights with the field, and in the way the JAR serves as a powerful amplifier to reach the broader community. My experience leading the JARs with CTA has reinforced my belief that collaboration is indispensable for continued resilience in cybersecurity, and I am proud to be a part of a community that embodies this principle.
A special thank you to Craig Newmark Philanthropies for their generous financial support of the CTA JARs collaboration.