Operation Passion Re-ignition(what is cybersecurity to me? part 3): Why I hate the CIA

Let's be completely honest. When you publish an article stating you "hate the CIA," people naturally assume you are diving headfirst into the bloodiest chapters of modern geopolitical history. And frankly, you have every right to assume that. If you strip away the Hollywood glamor and open up the declassified records you'll come to find out The CIA has been in operation since October 1947 but the amount of carnage they have unleashed on this world alone can fill a library.

We are talking about the agency orchestrating the Iranian coup in 1953 to depose a democratically elected government. We are talking about two decades of illegal human experimentation under operation Project MKUltra , the 9/11 post era where they took it upon themselves to run secret, lawless "black sites", implementing "enhanced interrogation techniques-waterboarding, sleep deprivation and physical abuse. More recently, we see their reliance on remote drone warfare, heavily integrated with modern data-mining platforms like Palantir — a name that literally means "the all-seeing stone."

…. Now to say i flat-out hate them is a bit of stretch. If you look at history they are just doing what most organizations who had absolute power have always done The only difference is that now, they have modern, state-of-the-art machinery and digital surveillance on their side. The real agency operates on a philosophy of shadow manipulation, absolute control, and a complete disregard for human autonomy to preserve its specific version of order.

But if you spend your days in the trenches of cybersecurity, you know there is a completely different CIA we battle against every single day.

And honestly? No, i don't hate that one too.

I'm talking about the CIA Triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.

The Pillars of the Game

Contrary to ironic belief of its real-world namesake the cybersecurity CIA is not trying to destabilize foreign nations. Its more of trying to ensure our digital infrastructure does not collapse like Jenga.

Another one is non-repudiation- the cryptographic assurance that a user cannot deny that they took this action as they left a signature which denotes to systematic accountability.

Why I Don't Hate It (The Hacker's Perception)

A lot of people may think its an outdated way of thinking since its a cold war 1970's thought process but if looked at in close proxomity to the rise of AI this framework saves infrastructure, refer back to the history article here : https://emmanuelwiseman.medium.com/operation-passion-re-ignition-what-is-cybersecurity-to-me-part-2-5f56f1ce583

You'll notice that war and cybersecurity mingle and most people think of the framework as a passive-defensive game but if we take Sun Tzu's words at face value :

To summarize you cannot protect what you don't know or understand and vice versa you cannot attack what you don't know or understand (unless you are a script kiddie) It's just a baseline rule sof engagement.

In my previous article, I wrote about building a real-time consulting engine to automate data pipelines for Hack The Box. What did I do that for? To improve my workflow, to move faster, and to keep my operational velocity moving. Hacking is a living, breathing sport. But if you want to really break a system, or if you want to build a defense that actually holds under pressure, you need to understand the basic architecture you're testing against.

The Final Opinion

The CIA triad is just that, it gives us a baseline language. it defines what we can target so if you are trying to deploy an autoamtion script or trying to pivot through an active network you are actively looking at how these three pillars are balanced…well four. If an organizatoin handles confidentiality perfectly but ignores avaliability, vulnerabiity exists. The triad isn't a cage; but a playing field.

The real geopolitical players impose order from above through shadow operations and total control . The CIA Triad of cybersecurity is just a tool, a structural map of data states. It doesn't dampen your passion or slow down your scripts unless you let it become red tape by bureaucratic compliance teams. Don't hate the framework. Master it, automate around it, build defensive architectures that move as fast as the live attacks hitting them.

Next topic to look at is Am I a (cyber) threat to you?

That's it for now. May you always be in a state of flow.

References:

The ICC's Probe Into Atrocities in Afghanistan: What to Know | Council on Foreign Relations The ICC appeals chamber's decision to move ahead on an investigation of grave abuses by combatants in Afghanistan…

Embedded content

What is the CIA Triad? The CIA triad is a fundamental model consisting of three components: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability…