Graduate Certificate in Intelligence and Analysis Tradecraft

This course provides an understanding of the current and future environment surrounding cyber intelligence. The course examines foundational terms such as cybersecurity and cyber warfare, and explores current and emergent cyber threats, effects of AI/ML, cyber threat actors and mechanisms for increased cyber resiliency in the public and private sectors. Students are asked to think critically as they address current cyber intelligence collection management, analytical techniques, tradecraft, security and counterintelligence methods.

This course provides students with comprehensive instruction on writing and communicating intelligence for U.S. government policy makers and other intelligence consumers. Students are instructed in the application of Intelligence Community Directive 203, which prescribes the use of estimative language, nine analytical tradecraft standards for all intelligence production and customized intelligence report writing. Upon successful completion of the course, students are able to write intelligence reports to U.S. intelligence community standards.

The daily threat of cybersecurity incidents has led private and public sector entities to treat intelligence gathering as a pivotal and crucial daily operation. This course teaches students the skills and techniques required to conduct open-source investigations using a wide range of publicly available resources, including online databases, social media, news articles, internet archives, government website and more. Resources gathered in an open-source investigation are an essential part of defending an organization’s online infrastructure. Students are trained to ethically verify, authenticate and assess the credibility of the information gathered and learn to articulate their findings in a well-organized and structured report.

This scenario-based course provides students with comprehensive instruction on the use of structured analytic techniques (SATs) in mitigating inherent cognitive and other biases, and in analyzing incomplete information sets to determine best supported analytic solutions and outcomes. Upon successful completion of this course, students are able to apply SATs to complex and/or incomplete sets of data to determine the best analytically supported and bias-free solutions, most likely outcomes, and best supported recommendations to policy makers.