OPEN-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE (OSINT) & THE DARK WEB

Today, digital communities and new media have dramatically increased the complexity of an effective threat analysis, thereby discovering risks affecting the security of a country.  The consequence is that gaining intelligence from the Internet is becoming a more important issue for intelligence services and law enforcement agencies. 

The social media ecosystem is where threat-actors (hackers, terrorists, criminals and serious organized crime organizations) commit the majority of their illegal actions and tackling crimnals on social media and the Dark Web requires a new paradigm in term of vision, technology and skills.

Most intelligence agencies are shifting to the new domain of cyber intelligence and security by creating a team of highly trained specialists, with knowledge on new investigation tools able to detect the risks on social media, identify the threat actors behind them and to mitigate the attacks. 

These specialists operate sophisticated OSINT and Cyber-HUMINT tools, which are strategic platforms able to detect the threats from different scenarios (e.g. political, social, financial, humanitarian) and related to specific regions or even trans-national. 

These platforms are tailor-made to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in terms of forensic case management, security and secrecy of the operations (e.g. data gathering and cyber ops), role based access with multiple users and departments accessing to the system with assigned roles and privileges and a closed system with any operation/analysis made to third-party services is established preserving anonymity and security.