iGuardian
The FBI’s Industry-Focused Cyber Intrusion Reporting Platform
With cyber threats continuing to emerge at the forefront of the FBI’s criminal and national security challenges, engaging public-private partners in information exchange alongside law enforcement and intelligence communities is critical. To bring trusted industry partners into the intelligence fold, the FBI has adapted its Guardian threat tracking and management system to include iGuardian—a secure information portal allowing industry-based, individual partners to report cyber intrusion incidents in real time.
The iGuardian portal is an evolution of eGuardian, the platform through which the FBI’s law enforcement partners provide potential terrorism-related threats and suspicious activity reports. While eGuardian enlists law enforcement users, iGuardian was developed specifically for partners within critical telecommunications, defense, banking and finance, and energy infrastructure sectors and is available over the sensitive but unclassified InfraGard network.
Comprising thousands of vetted, industry-aligned members nationally, InfraGard is the FBI’s public-private infrastructure protection coalition. The organization maintains its own secure network to distribute FBI alerts and bulletins and allow sharing of key threat information across its membership. Using the iGuardian system, members are encouraged to submit intrusion specifics directly to the FBI, including detail regarding malware infections, website defacements, and denial of service attacks. The iGuardian program likewise affords InfraGard partners access to information and intelligence derived from related incidents.
Each iGuardian incident report is expedited through Guardian to CyWatch, the FBI’s 24/7 cyber operations center, where agents and analysts triage and de-conflict the input, notify previously unknown intrusion victims, and assign leads to appropriate field offices for further investigation. This centralized management of criminal and national security cyber incidents positions the FBI to work more effectively with our partners to leverage known intelligence and forward pending investigations and operations.
As iGuardian yields an important, additional source of relevant cyber intrusion information, it also lends focus to a big-picture view of the threat posed by terrorists, nation-states, and criminal groups conducting network operations against the U.S. Creating this broad base of threat awareness and partnership is all-important to the FBI cyber mission.