Coming Soon: Enhancements to FB-ISAO’s Capabilities

The Faith-Based Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (FB-ISAO) provides members with information, analysis, and capabilities to help reduce risk while enhancing preparedness, security, and resilience. The team, with input from members, assesses the community’s needs for information to reduce risk while enhancing preparedness, security, and resilience. Indeed, community members’ input in the process is essential to identify their needs. For more on “Information Sharing and Member Engagement Best Practices,” please take a few minutes to read this post by Mayya Saab, Executive Director of FB-ISAO.

So, as a team, we love it when our members share feedback! Recently, some members were gracious enough to spend some of their time (quite a lot of time!) giving us feedback on our products and on the organization of our collaborative workspace. In addition, they helped us refine our member on-boarding process. A sincere thanks goes out to those members – you know who you are!

In the next few months, members will see some changes in our products, the way FB-ISAO Slack is organized, and the way new members are on-boarded. Below is a glimpse of some of the changes members can expect.

Adoption of the Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) version 2.0. FB-ISAO adopted the TLP since its inception. In January of 2023, FB-ISAO will move over to TLP 2.0. You can learn more here.

• The FB-ISAO Slack workspace will facilitate members’ ability to find the information they need. We will be eliminating some channels, renaming some others, and adding new ones. We will be expanding on the use of prefixes to help delineate the type of information that is shared in individual channels. Current channel prefixes are:

• g_ for FB-ISAO Working Group channels. Learn more about working groups.
• isc_ for Information Sharing Communities. Learn more about Information Sharing Communities
• pir_  for information that falls under FB-ISAO’s Priority Intelligence Requirements. Learn more about Priority Intelligence Requirements.

Going forward we will add the following prefixes. We will also be adding some topical channels that align with those prefixes:

• ofb_ for open-source intelligence information more likely pertinent to Faith-Based Organizations security operations.
• og_ for open-source intelligence information that is more general in nature but that may impact Faith-Based Organizations security operations.

Note: Members should join the ofb_ and og_ channels if they have a desire to incorporate open-source intelligence into their security operations.

We will continue to support channels that host information related to best practices, announcements, and training as well as some others.

Members will also see changes to our Faith-Based Daily Journal Highlights and our Weekly Digest. Members can expect more curated and contextualized information presented in the Faith-Based Daily Journal Highlights and the Weekly Digest.

Our Monthly Threat Brief Program will be refined to focus on educational topics. The topics will be shared with the community at least 3 months in advance so members have time to plan their participation.

Our new members will be invited to join a coaching session which will be an introduction to all things FB-ISAO and all the member benefits available to them. Quick tip, our seasoned members are welcome to join our on-boarding sessions as well!

These changes will be phased in over the course of the next few months. As always, members can reach out to the team at any time.

Finally, we want to encourage more participation! Members are welcome to share their feedback at any time. The team wants to be able to meet the community’s needs. We can’t do that without your help!