What is physical security intelligence?

Physical security intelligence is strategic information about situations and events that could potentially cause physical harm to an organisation and its people, buildings, or assets. Physical threats can include natural disasters and accidental damage, as well as vandalism, theft, and terrorism.

Intelligence about physical security threats can be gathered from a variety of sources, including physical surveillance, and monitoring open sources – like news, blogs, video content, social media posts, telegram chats and reports – as well as deep and dark web sources. This information is analysed to identify potential risks to physical security.

Physical security intelligence can help organisations manage physical security threats better by providing up-to-the-minute insight that enables them to make informed changes to security measures or emergency response plans.

What physical security intelligence means for your organisation

Companies often make cybersecurity a priority, but neglect physical security. But without physical security intelligence, organisations (and their leaders) are at risk of physical harm, as well as financial and reputational damage. Without physical security intelligence, organisations (and their leaders) can be at risk of harm, financial loss and reputational damage.

Physical security intelligence can cover the following risks:

Natural disasters: Physical security intelligence can alert organisations of an emergency and provide in-the-moment information that is vital to planning a response or coordinating relief efforts for disasters like hurricanes, floods, tsunamis and earthquakes.

Protests and activism: Physical security intelligence helps organisations get prepared for social activism or unrest that could cause business disruption or property damage.

International conflict: Conflict from wars and uprisings can threaten the physical security of people and assets and impact operations. Physical security intelligence provides organisations with the information needed to make decisions to mitigate risks.

Terrorism: Physical security intelligence helps organisations forecast and defend themselves from terrorist attacks.

Theft and criminal attacks: Theft of inventory, equipment or information is another physical security threat to organisations. This can also cause cybersecurity risk if servers, devices or sensitive information are stolen. Physical security intelligence helps organisations identify and manage the impact of physical security compromise.

How to defend against physical threats with physical security intelligence

Physical security threats are always evolving, and this requires organisations to efficiently collect, aggregate and analyse relevant data ahead of business impact. A key defence against physical security threats is operational monitoring, which is the process of watching-over and keeping track of all business operations.

Operational monitoring can:

• Enhance physical security intelligence by monitoring across physical locations
• Understand new and existing threats better and more holistically
• Provide real-time insight about how to respond to physical threats

How can your organisation make the most of physical security intelligence? 

Physical security intelligence is vital to protecting your people, places, and assets. It helps you develop strategies and make decisions that maximise your organisation’s readiness and resilience.

Silobreaker quickly determines the data you need to deliver on your physical security intelligence requirements, fully automating the collection and aggregation of news on protests, conflicts, terrorist groups, pandemics, and natural disasters– all in one place.

Silobreaker as a threat intelligence platform streamlines the whole intelligence cycle with a single workflow to compile, analyse, create reports and communicate with decision-makers in a fraction of the time. This integrated intelligence production enables organisations to track the development of incidents in real-time and easily switch between data sets, use cases, locations, and entity profiles. This improves efficiency when answering priority intelligence requirements – and reduces risk and time to action by providing decision-makers with actionable intelligence faster.