New Advisory Council to accelerate public interest R&D in threat-informed defense

Published in

MITRE-Engenuity

4 min readMar 22, 2023

The Center for Threat-Informed Defense (Center) is proud to announce the formation of its Advisory Council — a body which brings together the executive expertise of the Center’s Founding and Research Partner organizations chartered with setting the future course of how the Center achieves its mission. The Advisory Council will advise the Center on how to increase impact, support strategic growth, elevate its business model, and expand its focus, all in the interest of advancing threat-informed defense globally and truly changing the game on the adversary.

Since the Center’s launch in November of 2019, we have released 22 research and development projects created in collaboration with our valued industry participants. Now in our fourth year of operations, the Center is building upon our past success with an expansive new vision. In our recently published 2022 Impact Report, you can hear from Center Participants about their experiences and the impact of our work. The report highlights projects that arm defenders with a data driven view of adversary behaviors in the wild, simplify testing cyber defenses against critical threats, and help defenders understand what defensive measures can be applied to critical threats.

Those efforts and others continue into the coming year. They will be outlined in the Center’s soon to be released roadmap for 2023, which is an aggressive R&D plan focused on such efforts as creating new mapping tools for ATT&CK, expanding upon the successes of previous projects like Micro Emulation Plans, and new research in advancing detection engineering.

But the Center has goals beyond just growing and expanding on our previous projects. With the help of our new Advisory Council, we plan to:

Increase Impact

The Center is proud of our work for the public good and we must ensure it reaches the hands of defenders who can make best use of it. Sometimes that requires spreading the word. At other times, it requires improving accessibility and ease of adoption. Both of these goals are top of mind, and we will work closely with our advisors to achieve them.

Support Growth

The Center seeks address the most critical and impactful challenges across the global community. A global focus requires a global and cross-sector membership. With the help and expertise of our Advisory Council, we look forward to broadening the conversation and bringing in more voices to increase the global impact of our work.

Evolve Our Business Model

Since its founding, the Center’s model for collaborative R&D has established a track record for effectively solving problems in the public interest. We aim to both refine our business model and expand upon it to ensure that the Center is continuously and efficiently creating impactful resources that advance threat-informed defense. With the expertise and insights of our Advisory Council, we hope to expand not only our industry partnerships, but also how we operate our program.

Expand Our R&D Focus

The value of a threat-informed defense expands beyond traditional enterprise cybersecurity. To date, the Center’s R&D program has focused on bringing a threat-informed perspective to enterprise security, and helped the community build more efficient and effective security programs. Our Advisors will play a critical role in carefully evaluating new technology areas and domains that might benefit from our experience advancing threat-informed defense. Together, with our participants, Advisors, and MITRE research team, we can bring a threat-informed perspective to new areas like insider threat, fraud, privacy, and IoT.

Meet our Advisors

Our Advisors have a critical role to play in advancing threat-informed defense for the global community. We at the Center are excited to embark on this exciting new phase of our strategic growth with their guidance. We want to take a moment to thank our new Advisors for sharing with us their time and their expertise. Below you can find the full list of our new Advisors:

Threat-informed defense is built upon community

The community plays a critical role in the Center’s efforts to create effective and impactful resources focused on threat-informed defense. We are always on the lookout for innovators and collaborators that can provide ideas for new solutions. If you are interested in your organization becoming a key player in the evolution of threat-informed defense, check out our get involved page on our website or email us at ctid@mitre-engenuity.org.

About the Center for Threat-Informed Defense

The Center is a non-profit, privately funded research and development organization operated by MITRE Engenuity. The Center’s mission is to advance the state of the art and the state of the practice in threat-informed defense globally. Comprised of participant organizations from around the globe with highly sophisticated security teams, the Center builds on MITRE ATT&CK®, an important foundation for threat-informed defense used by security teams and vendors in their enterprise security operations. Because the Center operates for the public good, outputs of its research and development are available publicly and for the benefit of all.