Cybersecurity

What is the Difference Between Information and Intelligence?

When I hear some people discussing intelligence, quite often, what they are actually discussing is information.  There is a fundamental difference between the two, and it doesn’t appear to me that that difference is particularly well understood.  What’s the difference you ask?  The principle difference is that information is merely data.  Data by itself doesn’t include any context.  It doesn’t help us understand how to apply it to a specific problem.

Perhaps it’s easiest to illustrate this difference through an example.  I often hear people referring to data feeds and intelligence interchangeably.  For example, when speaking of their efforts to build, improve, or sustain their intelligence capability, people sometimes begin listing the different malicious domain name feeds they receive.  What’s the issue with this you ask?  The issue is that these data feeds often lack any context whatsoever.