Security Review: Bodyguards

By felixctc at 9:06 pm on February 3, 2008Comments Off on Security Review: Bodyguards

Security Review: Bodyguard
Overview:
Bodyguards are people who protect their clients from various treats such as assaults, assassination, and kidnapping. Depending on the importance of the client who is being protected, some clients might have a team of bodyguards while another might just need only one. The general minimum requirements for bodyguards are trained to use firearms, unarmed combats, tactical driving, and first aid to ensure the safety of the client. In addition, for bodyguards who need to protect more important person or who are working in teams, they tend to have specializations for various skills like crowd control, protective escort, and finding electronic threats.


Assets and Security goals:
Overall, the assets that the bodyguards are protecting are lives and privacies of the clients, and maybe their family also. Here are a few different types of clients that bodyguards usually protect.
-Political figures: Since government officials usually have enemies for various reasons, they usually have a team of bodyguards protecting them. The goal is to keep these government officials and their family safe from mostly assaults, kidnapping, or assassination.
-Wealthy people: Because this type of clients has a lot of valuables, kidnappers or thieves are attracted to them for money. In this case, the goal for this asset leans more to the side of keeping the clients and whoever is important to the clients safe from kidnapping.
-Celebrities: This type of assets is usually the more well-known type to the public. Therefore, the goal for this asset is usually to protect them from assault and stalkers.
Adversaries/Threats:
-Enemies of the assets: This includes political figures that are against the assets, and other competitors to the assets. With this type of adversaries, the threats to the asset would range from simple assaults to assassination.
-Kidnappers: This is a possible threat to all the assets because kidnapping the assets has multiple effects. First, the adversary can gain money by asking for ransom. Also, the adversaries can threaten the assets or the relatives to force them to do certain task that the kidnapper wants.
-Stalkers: This type of adversary usually causes the minimal amount of threats. However, they tend to harass the assets. The assets usually feel threaten because of having a stalker that invades their privacy.

Potential Weakness:
Because the bodyguards are human, there are various weaknesses. For example, bodyguard cannot withstand more than a few gunshots. Therefore, the bodyguards are quite penetrable. In addition, because they are human, there will be chances that the bodyguards betray their clients under certain circumstances. An example would be a bodyguard just leaves the clients while the client is being attack. Furthermore, because technology advances, bodyguards need to know additional ways to protect the clients. However, chances are, similar to other types of security, the bodyguards wont’ be able to keep up with the adversaries’ new attacks to the clients.

Potential Defense:
There are a few possible potential defenses. First, we can try to increase the defenses mechanisms on the bodyguard. For example, have all of them wear bulletproof vest that can withstand more impact. Although bodyguards might have to look presentable on occasions, they should wear armors that can protect the head also. This way, they can take more hits for the clients even within gunfire. Second, maybe we can create robotic bodyguards with durable metals as the exterior so shield the clients. However, this might make the asset stand out from the crowd even more and that can make the assets easier to spot as a target. Third, we can try to improve the knowledge of the bodyguards. Give them training courses as new technologies are created. This way, the bodyguards will learn more ways to protect the assets. This is especially important for the specialist bodyguards.

Risk Analysis:
In general, bodyguards are protecting the lives of the assets. Therefore, it is crucial that the bodyguards get the job done. If we want to minimize the chance of this risk, the potential defenses I mentioned we improve the chance of survival for the assets. However, the risk of losing privacy will definitely increase because with the bodyguards wearing more defense mechanisms, the bodyguards will stand out more, thus make the assets stands out also. If the goal is to maximize the assets privacy, then in order to make the assets not stand out as much, then the bodyguards will need to look more like normal civilians. This means they might not have as many defense mechanisms to protect the assets or themselves. This makes the assets more vulnerable to threats. The new bulletproof vest, Dragon Skin, is available. This is one way to improve the durability of the bodyguards. As technology improves, I believe defense mechanisms will be less noticeable. Therefore, both the privacy and safety will increase. A bigger picture is can we really trust the bodyguards will be loyal to the assets no matter what happens. The bodyguards could get scare and leave the assets behind. This would be an issue of the work ethics of the bodyguards.

Conclusion
Although bodyguards are professionals of protecting their clients, I believe that they still have a lot of vulnerabilities. Depending the type of assets and the type of bodyguards available, different threats can arise. Because there so many situations that the assets can be in danger, it is extremely difficult to create mechanical bodyguards. This way, the risk of bodyguards betraying the clients will be eliminated. However, if mechanical bodyguards are made of machines, this means that there will be other types of vulnerabilities to exploit.

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