The Art of Attack

Chapter 7Information Processing in Practice

To talk about how to process information, we first have to talk about information itself. When I talk about information, I mean facts, figures, knowledge, details, evidence, findings, insight, and intelligence. Finding these sorts of information types is most commonly achieved through Open-Source Intelligence, often referred to as OSINT.

OSINT means many things to many people. Its official definition is the practice of collecting information from published or otherwise publicly available sources. These sources include newspapers, broadcasts, official government documents made available to the public, and most often OSINT is reduced to information available online. Of course, there are other ways to gain information that are either not listed in this book or illegal.

However, just having heaps of information on a company or its asset, as examples, is not the final step in your intelligence gathering endeavors. You, as the collector, must be able to scrutinize information for its value in relation to the objective set out.

Now we can talk about information processing. Information processing is how you perceive, analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information. Processing information is as critical as collecting it, and it must be processed strictly through the use of the laws of the mindset, which are:

1. Start with the end in mind
2. Weaponizing information for the good of the objective
3. Pretext can never be broken*
4. Every action taken must ...