A Rapidly Changing World
Geopolitical intelligence has never been more critical for organizations. Every decision regarding people, data and assets is affected by a rapidly shifting global context. Conflicts can upend supplier networks overnight and put employees in peril. Elections and policies can reshape the regulatory environment and often drive disinformation campaigns. Meanwhile, cyber threat actors track these developments, adjusting their tradecraft and targeting to capitalize on this uncertainty.
Making Sense of Chaos
The impact of these events is clear: geopolitical events carry significant physical and cyber risk, from which no organization is immune. Yet, as organizations face the flood of information, they struggle to translate these often fragmented and unreliable signals into decisive action. To navigate these risks, security leaders need laser focused and contextual understanding to determine which events matter to their enterprise, foresight of complex global political events, and expert assessments that connect strategic developments with tactical action.
Geopolitical Intelligence 2.0 from Intel 471 - What’s New?
The next phase of Intel 471’s Geopolitical Intelligence offering turns chaos into clarity. Leveraging expert analysis and advanced early warning capabilities, our solution empowers organizations to proactively anticipate and manage the upstream events that influence both the cyber and physical threat landscape. This comprehensive approach enables businesses to safeguard their operations, assets and stakeholders against the full spectrum of geopolitical developments. The solution offers new features including:
- SEMPLICE Intelligence Framework
- Geopolitical General Intelligence Requirements (GP-GIR) Framework
- Significant Activity (SIGACT) Reports
- Picture Intelligence Summary (PICTINSUM)
- Intelligence Estimates
- Tension Point Profiles
- Requests for Information
These new features unlock use cases beyond cyber geopolitical risk, supporting organizations to mitigate physical security and travel risk, third-party and supplier risk, and strategic planning. This blog will showcase four of these new features, and illustrate how they can help organizations navigate today’s complex and rapidly evolving global risk environment.
SEMPLICE — A Structured Approach to Intelligence Analysis
SEMPLICE, our custom intelligence framework, is central to the upgraded solution. The name is an acronym of the eight key geopolitical event categories used for analysis: Social, Economic, Military, Political, Legal, Information and Technology, Cyber, and Environmental. It ensures we provide multi-domain coverage of the risk landscape in our reporting. SEMPLICE also helps CTI and risk professionals manage the flow of intelligence, reducing noise and enabling granular control over what the user cares about the most. Notably, SIGACTs are tagged to SEMPLICE categories to streamline filtering, prioritization and rapid action. The PICTINSUM uses SEMPLICE categories to color-code events on a near real-time interactive world map, making multi-domain risks immediately visible in each geography. Finally, SEMPLICE structures our Intelligence Estimate reports, providing a clear risk assessment across each category that contributes to a defensible baseline, and rolls up into each country’s overall Threat Rating.
SEMPLICE and General Intelligence Requirements
Each category from our SEMPLICE framework has become a parent General Intelligence Requirement (GIR), ensuring our collections and reporting on global events and actors are aligned with stakeholder needs. Just like our Cyber Underground GIR Handbook, a new, supplemental, Geopolitical Intelligence-specific GIR Handbook (GP-GIR) is now available for download for those teams looking to improve their intelligence planning.
Significant Activity Reports — Speed and Clarity
SIGACT reports are designed for immediate action. They deliver the early warning and situational awareness of a geopolitical event that organizations need to rapidly assess its relevance and impact for a more proactive defense. By filtering by SEMPLICE tag and using the succinct event description clearly separated from its assessment, readers can triage relevant reports with immediacy.
Converge Insights & Prioritize Hunt Operations
Bridging the gap between global events and cyber threats remains a core element of our Geopolitical Intelligence solution. Geopolitical dynamics increasingly drive the convergence of cybercrime, nation-state and geopolitical events. Organizations need to anticipate the cyber threats at risk of emerging from geopolitical flashpoints to proactively defend against potential disruption.Our Geopolitical Intelligence empowers organizations to achieve this. The enhanced solution is delivered through our new cyber intelligence platform, Verity471, which integrates our cyber threat intelligence, threat hunting and external exposure intelligence portfolios. As a result, our geopolitical insights are enriched by cross-portfolio intelligence that is grounded in the frameworks, technology infrastructure, and cyber HUMINT proficiency that set Intel 471 apart. Our intelligence teams bring a deep understanding of the cyber underground, native-level language capabilities, and extensive experience in law enforcement, intelligence, military and the private sector, resulting in a nuanced analysis. As a result, our geopolitical reporting equips teams with an unparalleled analysis of the cyber-geopolitical nexus.
Adversary Profile reports fuse geopolitical context with insights from CTI, huntable behaviors and exposure insights. Details such as exploited vulnerabilities, links to pre-validated hunts and high-fidelity IOCs allow for rapid operationalization.
SIGACTs not only provide cyber threat situational awareness, but also the tactical intelligence to detect, hunt and neutralize the cyber attacks emerging from it. When appropriate, reports — including SIGACTs —will include technical details including indicators of compromise (IOCs); MITRE ATT&CK tactics, techniques and procedures; known threat group aliases, and links to our own behavior based threat hunting packages. These details are unveiled and verified by our deep understanding of real-world cyber adversary behaviour. As a result, teams can pivot through geopolitical insights to prioritize hunt operations and drive proactive measures.
Picture Intelligence Summary — Visualize Risk
Verity471 also allows our users to benefit from other new features like its streamlined UI, ability to drill-down and pivot on items of interest, AI assistant and an enhanced dashboard featuring the PICTINSUM. This interactive map plots the SIGACT reports, which are colour-coded by SEMPLICE category, in near-real time. Organizations can filter the PICTINSUM by SEMPLICE category to create a custom intelligence picture that aligns with their unique threat environment and areas of interest.
An interactive map showing the location of colour-coded SIGACT reports for advanced filtering and situational awareness.
Enhanced Situational Awareness
The PICTINSUM allows security teams to track and monitor risks as they unfold both temporarily and spatially, giving them the powerful situational awareness they need to anticipate tipping points and react accordingly. A picture tells a thousand words, users can identify the location of risk at a glance, allowing them to assess its proximity to key operations or partner organizations and take preventative action if necessary. The PICTINSUM can also be filtered by date so that organizations can identify trends over time and drill down into what really matters. By building risk heatmaps, users can predict potential risks before they escalate and proactively adapt policies, redistribute resources or reconsider mergers to maintain resilience.
Intelligence Estimate Reports — Country Risk Profiles
Whether planning travel, conducting third-party due diligence or evaluating market expansion, organizations must have an understanding of the security risks that accompany travel and cross-border operations. In certain locations, employees may encounter protests that could escalate into violence or elevated risk from criminal activity, including kidnappings. Physical assets also face risk from disruption and losses in times of unrest —- for example, Allianz Commercial reported that between 2019-2023, the total economic and insured losses from just seven unrest incidents was over US$13 billion.
Protecting data, intellectual property and assets in other countries poses specific challenges. It’s essential to gain an understanding of a country’s data privacy laws and surveillance laws to gauge the likelihood of device inspection, monitoring or seizure at ports of entry. Many governments procure commercial spyware, increasing the value of strong traveler operational security (OPSEC) and mobile-hardening measures.
Intelligence Estimate report showing tabs for each SEMPLICE category and overall threat rating.
Our new Intelligence Estimates equip users with a robust baseline understanding of the security environment for over 50 countries (and counting). They support the development and refinement of internal security policies and inform strategic decisions around employee travel and market engagement. Each country receives transparent, qualitative scores across the eight SEMPLICE categories, which contribute to the overall Threat Rating. Dedicated tabs for each domain make it easy to drill into the specific risks that matter to your program, such as:
- Information & Technology: Restrictions on VPNs, encrypted communications, platform access and media controls. This will help organizations adapt OPSEC posture to the local context to avoid data surveillance or legal implications.
- Economic: Inflation dynamics, currency volatility, capital control and sanctions/trade policy shifts, translated into likely effects on supplier reliability, lead times, logistics, and contract risk.
- Cyber: The motivation, trends and sophistication of cyber threats in the country to protect travellers from becoming targets from espionage and help leaders highlight opportunities for cybersecurity investment.
Gain the Intelligence Advantage
While our first version of our Geopolitical Intelligence was strong, this upgraded solution builds upon that and is designed to close the gaps that many teams struggle with. SEMPLICE ensures our reporting is actionable, relevant and aligned with the realities of today’s interconnected and geopolitically complex threat landscape. SIGACTs are engineered for immediacy, keeping teams focused on what matters now, while still offering technical depth when it is relevant for detection and response. The PICTINSUM turns a linear stream of updates into a spatial-temporal analysis layer that reveals clusters and tipping points. Country profiles extend value from daily operations to policy and strategy, giving leaders a foundation for travel, procurement and market decisions. All of this is delivered within Verity 471, with an Artificial Intelligence assistant that speeds search, synthesis and collaboration so that practitioners can do more with the time they have.
Clarity in the geopolitical space brings you an intelligence advantage. Geopolitical Intelligence 2.0 will be available from October 30th. Request a demo of the solution to understand firsthand how you can turn global chaos into meaningful action.