What are the 5 OPSEC steps?

To make a security plan, you need to know your OPSEC. That's what the military calls "Operational Security" — the basics of how to keep operations secret and therefore safe. The five-step OPSEC process includes:

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OPSEC is a way to protect information.
Step 1. Identify Critical Information
Step 2. Analyze Your Threats
Step 3. Analyze Vulnerabilities
Step 4. Assess Risk
Step 5. Develop Countermeasures
The Five Steps of Operational Security

Identifying critical info & threats
Analyzing critical info
Assessing risks
Developing countermeasures
Implementing & evaluating the plan

OPSEC is a way to protect information.

In short, OPSEC is a way to protect information. It's also a process that helps you identify what information needs protection and how it can be used against you.

What does that mean? Well, if your cookie recipe has been stolen, then I don't think “cookies” are important enough to merit protection. But if the ingredients list contains an ingredient that is toxic to dogs or children—because cookies aren't just for humans anymore!—then maybe those details should be protected. As with many things in life, it's not about what you have explicitly but about what others might get from having access to it.

In other words: Information security isn't just for computer geeks; everyone should be taking steps toward protecting their own personal OPSEC data every day!

Step 1. Identify Critical Information

The first step in the OPSEC process is to identify critical information. What does this mean? It means identifying what is important to your organization, and then knowing how to protect it. Because every organization has different needs and priorities, there's no magic bullet approach that applies across the board for all companies—this is why it's so important for you as an employee or manager to get familiar with your company's security protocols before starting a project that requires sensitive data.

Step 2. Analyze Your Threats

The second step in the OPSEC process is to analyze your threats. Here, you'll need to identify the threat and determine its likelihood, capability, and intention. To begin, ask yourself: Who are my adversaries? What are their capabilities? How much do they know about me and my organization?

Next, comes a critical question: What do I really care about? This will help determine what assets can be attacked by your adversary (your people or physical infrastructure). Your assets may include personnel information such as medical records or social security numbers; financial information like credit card numbers; intelligence data; research reports; customer lists; business plans; trade secrets or proprietary information; customer databases containing sensitive personal details such as Social Security Numbers and home addresses of customers who bought products from your company—the list goes on.

Step 3. Analyze Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are gaps in security and a way for the enemy to exploit your information. For example, if you use social media and post pictures of yourself in uniform on Facebook, then that could be a vulnerability to an adversary. If you have images of classified material on your cell phone and it gets lost or stolen, this is another high-risk vulnerability.

The third step in the OPSEC process is analyzing vulnerabilities so you can determine how to mitigate them. There are several ways to analyze vulnerabilities:

Identify potential points of attack—think about what makes you vulnerable as an individual or unit and what might expose your mission or location.
Analyze how long an asset will remain sensitive—for example, once a photograph goes public on Twitter it may no longer be sensitive because everyone knows about it at that point (exposure). However, if there was only one copy available before then everyone would want to see it (value).

Step 4. Assess Risk

In this step, you evaluate the likelihood of an event happening and its potential consequences. This includes assessing how likely it is that you will be targeted, how likely it is that your information can be exploited, and what are the consequences of the threat of exploiting your information.

Step 5. Develop Countermeasures

As the last step, you'll identify who will implement the countermeasures. The person or team that implements a countermeasure is responsible for its success.

In addition to identifying who will implement your countermeasures, it's also important that you identify who will monitor and maintain them. Monitoring and maintaining include making sure that all of the components of your countermeasure are working properly and ensuring they're constantly updated as needed.

You should also have someone in charge of evaluating whether or not your OPSEC plan is working properly. This person should take an objective look at things like how many people know about each piece of sensitive information and whether or not any of those people could leak that information if they wanted to do so (which might require changing certain aspects). Lastly, make sure that someone has been assigned responsibility for approving any changes made during this step so everyone knows what's going on!

Conclusion

So, now you know what OPSEC is and the five-step process for following it. It’s important to remember that OPSEC is not rocket science—it’s common sense. Most of us have never had to consider whether information about where we live, work and play could be used against us or our loved ones. But if you think about it, there are often clues in plain sight that share a lot more than we realize. So, take a few minutes to identify critical information about yourself and keep it safe and secure using these simple steps above. It’s really easy when you know-how!

Learn about Operational Security (OPSEC) in Data Protection 101, our series on the fundamentals of information security.

Operational security (OPSEC), also known as procedural security, is a risk management process that encourages managers to view operations from the perspective of an adversary in order to protect sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

Though originally used by the military, OPSEC is becoming popular in the private sector as well. Things that fall under the OPSEC umbrella include monitoring behaviors and habits on social media sites as well as discouraging employees from sharing login credentials via email or text message.

The Five Steps of Operational Security

The processes involved in operational security can be neatly categorized into five steps:

Identify your sensitive data, including your product research, intellectual property, financial statements, customer information, and employee information. This will be the data you will need to focus your resources on protecting.
Identify possible threats. For each category of information that you deem sensitive, you should identify what kinds of threats are present. While you should be wary of third parties trying to steal your information, you should also watch out for insider threats, such as negligent employees and disgruntled workers.
Analyze security holes and other vulnerabilities. Assess your current safeguards and determine what, if any, loopholes or weaknesses exist that may be exploited to gain access to your sensitive data.
Appraise the level of risk associated with each vulnerability. Rank your vulnerabilities using factors such as the likelihood of an attack happening, the extent of damage that you would suffer, and the amount of work and time you would need to recover. The more likely and damaging an attack is, the more you should prioritize mitigating the associated risk.
Get countermeasures in place. The last step of operational security is to create and implement a plan to eliminate threats and mitigate risks. This could include updating your hardware, creating new policies regarding sensitive data, or training employees on sound security practices and company policies. Countermeasures should be straightforward and simple. Employees should be able to implement the measures required on their part with or without additional training.

Follow these best practices to implement a robust, comprehensive operational security program:

Implement precise change management processes that your employees should follow when network changes are performed. All changes should be logged and controlled so they can be monitored and audited.
Restrict access to network devices using AAA authentication. In the military and other government entities, a “need-to-know” basis is often used as a rule of thumb regarding access and sharing of information.
Give your employees the minimum access necessary to perform their jobs. Practice the principle of least privilege.
Implement dual control. Make sure that those who work on your network are not the same people in charge of security.
Automate tasks to reduce the need for human intervention. Humans are the weakest link in any organization’s operational security initiatives because they make mistakes, overlook details, forget things, and bypass processes.
Incident response and disaster recovery planning are always crucial components of a sound security posture. Even when operational security measures are robust, you must have a plan to identify risks, respond to them, and mitigate potential damages.

Risk management involves being able to identify threats and vulnerabilities before they become problems. Operational security forces managers to dive deeply into their operations and figure out where their information can be easily breached. Looking at operations from a malicious third-party’s perspective allows managers to spot vulnerabilities they may have otherwise missed so that they can implement the proper countermeasures to protect sensitive data.

Tags: Data Protection 101