If you do not know how to ask the right question, you will discover nothing.
W. Edwards Deming
All of the information that you have gathered has been exploited and is now sitting—formatted and standardized—in a database or a threat-intelligence platform. Now what? The information sitting there does little good until it is analyzed. The Analyze phase of F3EAD is one of the hardest to articulate but also one of the most important. This is the phase where we take data and information and process it into intelligence. This chapter covers the basic principles of analysis, models such as target-centric and structured analysis, and processes to assign confidence levels and address cognitive biases.
The Fundamentals of Analysis
To properly analyze the information you have, you must go through another (thankfully, smaller) version of the intelligence cycle. You must decide what your requirements are or, in other words, what questions you are going to answer. To get started, you first need to collect the information that you will use to answer those questions. Most of that information was gathered throughout the investigation and standardized in the Exploit phase, but other information will be needed to enrich or augment that data so it can be properly analyzed. Therefore, you may need to continue to collect more data as you move into the Analyze phase. The Analyze phase of F3EAD captures the entire intelligence cycle, pictured in Figure 8-1.
Figure 8-1. Analysis ...
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