Kill Chains have been used for many years in the defense industry to describe the phases of an activity and help outline what each phases does, how we enter those phases, and how we exit them. Kill Chains are an adapted, action-focused version of the value chain analysis that Michael Porter popularized in the 1980s. What these types of analysis, or kill chains, are good at is helping us understand the process of getting our task, penetrating a target network/system in this case, done. Lockheed Martin is credited with having crafted their concept of a Cyber Kill Chain to the intrusion game, with the paper Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains. (http://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed/data/corporate/documents/LM-White-Paper-Intel-Driven-Defense.pdf.)
To save us a little time, here is a peek at what that looks like graphically on their site:
Meant to model...