Recorded Future 2022: Deploying the Intelligence Cloud in Conflict

Recorded Future clients, colleagues, partners, and friends — welcome to 2023. We have certainly lived through a tumultuous three years — two years of COVID, and with russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine, one year of a major war in the heart of Europe. The ask for meaningful intelligence-derived insights has never been bigger. We call this securing the world with intelligence.

We are now 950 people at Recorded Future and recently announced that our annual recurring revenues (ARR) surpassed $250M (hint, it’s more now). Maybe more important than the raw numbers is that we are all 100% focused on intelligence. No end points, no firewalls, no SIEM, etc. Exclusively intelligence. And this will continue to be the strategy for the foreseeable future. We believe cybersecurity, and frankly security in general, requires an intelligence company. The Intelligence Company. We’re it.

Over the last 25 years, the world has migrated to the internet, making it a reflection of the world, and over the next 25 years, the world will become a reflection of the internet. Indeed, democracy, power, currency, influence, and identity will all be a reflection of the internet. And against the backdrop of this totemic internet, or maybe even running on top of this internet, a convergence of cyber, geopolitics/war, and disinformation is happening at a rapid pace. We’re not able to separate the digital battlefield from the kinetic battlefield, nor information operations from any on-field maneuvers. Just as air superiority won wars of the past, data superiority will now win the ongoing war against the adversary. The imperative is here to build an intelligence capability on top of the internet. In fact, an analytics engine grafted to the internet. Recorded Future calls this the Intelligence Cloud.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022 previewed a brutish and repugnant reality that threatens our just and peaceful world order. russia started what can only be described as an unjust and wanton war that they, on top of it all, were prodigiously inept at executing. Nonetheless, it has brought incalculable harm to Ukraine. It is a war fought in the physical domain, in the cyber domain, and the [dis]information domain — truly a [sadly] modern war. Recorded Future rapidly declared itself non-neutral and has pledged our unwavering support of Ukraine.

We’re humbled and proud to see some nine government agencies in Ukraine use Recorded Future, and equally proud to have entered into a large collaboration to protect Ukrainian critical infrastructure. We are all in on supporting Ukraine in winning the war against russia.

The convergence between cyber, war/geopolitics, and disinformation is blatantly clear in the russia’s war of aggression. It is also clear that the role of intelligence is more important in war than ever. Obviously, intelligence has always been critical to the successful planning and execution of combat operations, however, in an internet-centric world, intelligence will not just guide bullets and armies, intelligence is a bullet in itself. Observing how the West has promoted intelligence to the tip of the spear is satisfying, and Recorded Future is proud to support from the pommel to the tip of that spear.

We organize our collection and analytical approach around three pillars — we need to have the best intelligence on i) Adversary Intent and TTPs; ii) Command and Control Infrastructure as well as general network intelligence; and iii) Targets and their elaborate surface areas. We now track some 270 nation-state actors and tens of thousands of cybercriminals, as well as their intentions, infrastructure, and TTPs. We track more command and control infrastructure than anybody else, and we track one million potential targets in total. Recorded Future’s approach ensures that our intelligence is not biased by a particular firewall, endpoint, etc. Instead, we have built out our intelligence collection completely deliberately for maximum insight and visibility.

We provide our clients, both public and private sector players, with access to our intelligence through the Intelligence Cloud. We now have 1,500+ clients connected to the Intelligence Cloud and more than 100 partners. As we all interact with the Intelligence Cloud, existing data is enriched and correlated, and the Intelligence Graph grows in size, interconnections, and quality. I firmly believe that the Intelligence Cloud will be a foundational element of defending good in the future.

Hopefully, the foregoing highlights our tremendous ambitions here at Recorded Future and our belief that we can create and shape our future by building great technology. The investments in technology and intelligence are done in a way where there’s zero doubt: the more daunting the idea, the happier we are to dive in — be it intelligence for identity, network, or malware. The only two guiding principles are that it a) needs to connect to the Intelligence Graph — make the greater data set better and b) solve critical, difficult client problems.

Sometimes you also need to look beyond your own four walls for such novel ideas, so we were thrilled to be joined by SecurityTrails and Hatching this year, which brought us by far (!) the best technology and teams tackling Attack Surface Monitoring and Malware Analysis, respectively. Both are now firmly embedded into the Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud and feed the Intelligence Graph at a breathtaking pace.

Over the last two years, we’ve started a global newsroom at Recorded Future — Recorded Future News. You can read and listen to their excellent reporting via The Record (our cyber/intelligence news website) and Click Here (our top-rated podcast). In the extremely relevant intersection of intelligence, cyber, and statecraft, they’ve broken incredible stories, interviewed the key leaders, and also demonstrated that it’s possible to build new media properties that set a very high bar for domain-specific areas. With tens of thousands of listeners each month, Click Here has rapidly become one of the top tech podcasts overall, as you can see below.

We are in the early innings of a post globalization world. Uncertainty is abundant and will likely be even more abundant. Intelligence will be required by governments and corporations. We thank you all — clients, partners, and the Recorded Future team. I’m looking forward to working closely with you in 2023. Remember, even in this time of war, inflation, disease, and potential recession, when fear is high and there’s blood in the streets, that’s the time of opportunity and adversity will forge the victors.

I'll end by quoting President Zelensky from Bakhmut "History only remembers the victors, only the strong and the brave."

Godspeed! C