With high-profile data breaches like Anthem and Sony occurring more frequently, the American public is increasingly anxious for a long-term solution against cybersecurity threats. People are no longer interested in hearing about how hacks happen; instead they want to understand what can be done to prevent them.
Intel Security (formerly McAfee) was involved for more than a year in a national initiative to answer that question, working with other private sector partners and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The culmination of the initiative, in response to an executive order, was the release of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which provides a toolset for corporations and other organizations to assess, prioritize and mitigate threats to their systems.
After the Framework was released in February 2014, our client Intel wanted to ensure it not only made sense theoretically, but that it would be practical in a real-world setting. In the year following the release, Intel applied the Framework to its own in-house IT department. The findings of this work were catalogued in a white paper that Intel released on February 12 of this year – exactly one year after the release of the Framework itself.
As the public sector PR firm for Intel Security, RH led the PR rollout of the white paper. Because of Intel’s leadership in trialing the Framework, we wanted not only to launch the paper to industry and government audiences but also to drive the news cycle around the anniversary of the Framework itself. Accordingly, we secured an exclusive with the premier cybersecurity policy publication Inside Cybersecurity, and had the story publish in tandem with the press release and the whitepaper. RH then pushed the paper out to top DC media, landing stories in NPR, SC Magazine and FedScoop. With the comprehensive messaging we had developed linking the white paper to the protection of critical infrastructure as a whole and our aggressive outreach, we were able to position Intel as THE thought leader on implementing protection of critical infrastructure.
Our campaign was important as it allowed Intel to plant a thought leadership flag on implementing the Framework. This white paper was the first documented use case of the NIST framework in action, and with its release and accompanying press coverage, has become a major proof point of Intel’s knowledge on this issue.
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