A Case-Control Measurement Study of OSINT Source Effectiveness for Critical Infrastructure Defense

Abstract

Defenders of critical infrastructure (CI) subscribe to many public open-source intelligence (OSINT) feeds without an empirical basis for which feeds actually precede attacks. We provide one. Across 54 confirmed CI cyberattacks from 2010 through 2024 spanning twelve named CI sectors plus a cross-sector category (consolidation rules in Section IV), paired with 12 null-control vulnerability cases drawn from the same source space, we audit per-source attack coverage, null-case contamination, and signal lead time for ten public OSINT source classes that meet a minimum-volume threshold. Sources separate cleanly into three operationally distinct mission profiles (pooled Fisher exact p = 3.4x10^-8): precursor (six classes with zero observed null firings at coverage at or above 5%), disclosure-exposure (three classes whose null contamination meets or exceeds attack coverage), and one large broad-coverage class that mixes the two profiles but retains 91.3% within-corpus precision. The precision-side classification is stable across a 2019 temporal partition and across a US-versus-non-US geographic partition. Two sources, one broad-coverage and one precursor, cover 92.6% of corpus attacks; three cover 96.3%. The greedy portfolio at k = 3 outperforms the mean random three-source subset by 39.8 percentage points. Several source classes widely treated as canonical for industrial control system defense fall into the disclosure-exposure profile by operational mission, not by quality. Per-sector, per-actor, and per-jurisdiction portfolios diverge in rank order despite a shared rank-one source. The corpus, linkage protocol, and classification rules are released.