Identity OPSEC
Identity OPSEC involves procedures and countermeasures that you take to protect your identity. With online collection operations, two identities need to be protected; your identity and that of any online personas that have been utilized to run the operation. Let's examine both.
Personal protection
Your identity is perhaps the most critical piece of information that should be protected during your collection operations. Any piece of personally identifiable information (PII), and even information about your infrastructure that can lead to you being identified, should be protected at all costs and even completely separated from the collection operations. Complete separation is usually not an issue for corporate organizations, assuming that their security research teams use best practices, perform risk assessments, and actively try not to mingle personal information with corporate collection operations.
This becomes a little more difficult when the security...