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Vol. 1 · Ed. 2026
CyberGlossary
Entry № 267

Crown Jewels Analysis

¿Qué es Crown Jewels Analysis?

Crown Jewels AnalysisA MITRE-popularized methodology that identifies the small set of mission-critical assets whose loss would unacceptably harm the organization, then concentrates protection, monitoring, and IR investment there.


Crown Jewels Analysis (CJA) is a methodology formalized by MITRE in the mid-2010s and incorporated into the U.S. DoD's mission-assurance practice. The premise: most organizations cannot harden everything to the same level, and most adversaries don't care about everything either. CJA produces a ranked, justified list of the assets — datasets, systems, applications, identities, processes — whose compromise or loss would produce unacceptable mission, business, regulatory, or reputational impact, and the dependencies (network paths, credentials, supporting services) that lead to them. The output drives where to concentrate defense-in-depth controls (segmentation, monitoring tier, IR tabletop priority, cyber-insurance scoping, recovery RTO/RPO), what threat models to take most seriously, and which paths in attack-graph terms to disrupt first. CJA is often a precursor to attack-path analysis, MITRE ATT&CK technique prioritization, and adversary-emulation scoping. It is also a common requirement of cyber-insurance underwriting and of regulator-led resilience reviews (DORA, NIS2, U.S. DOD CMMC).

Ejemplos

  1. 01

    A bank's CJA identifies the payments-clearing system, the customer-master database, and the production HSM as crown jewels and routes their telemetry to a dedicated SOC tier.

  2. 02

    After a CJA, the IR tabletop scenarios for the next year focus on ransomware against the crown-jewel ERP rather than a generic phishing breach.

Preguntas frecuentes

¿Qué es Crown Jewels Analysis?

A MITRE-popularized methodology that identifies the small set of mission-critical assets whose loss would unacceptably harm the organization, then concentrates protection, monitoring, and IR investment there. Pertenece a la categoría de Defensa y operaciones en ciberseguridad.

¿Qué significa Crown Jewels Analysis?

A MITRE-popularized methodology that identifies the small set of mission-critical assets whose loss would unacceptably harm the organization, then concentrates protection, monitoring, and IR investment there.

¿Cómo funciona Crown Jewels Analysis?

Crown Jewels Analysis (CJA) is a methodology formalized by MITRE in the mid-2010s and incorporated into the U.S. DoD's mission-assurance practice. The premise: most organizations cannot harden everything to the same level, and most adversaries don't care about everything either. CJA produces a ranked, justified list of the assets — datasets, systems, applications, identities, processes — whose compromise or loss would produce unacceptable mission, business, regulatory, or reputational impact, and the dependencies (network paths, credentials, supporting services) that lead to them. The output drives where to concentrate defense-in-depth controls (segmentation, monitoring tier, IR tabletop priority, cyber-insurance scoping, recovery RTO/RPO), what threat models to take most seriously, and which paths in attack-graph terms to disrupt first. CJA is often a precursor to attack-path analysis, MITRE ATT&CK technique prioritization, and adversary-emulation scoping. It is also a common requirement of cyber-insurance underwriting and of regulator-led resilience reviews (DORA, NIS2, U.S. DOD CMMC).

¿Cómo defenderse de Crown Jewels Analysis?

Las defensas contra Crown Jewels Analysis combinan habitualmente controles técnicos y prácticas operativas, como se detalla en la definición.

¿Cuáles son otros nombres para Crown Jewels Analysis?

Nombres alternativos comunes: CJA, Mission-critical asset analysis.

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