In this blog, Fivecast CEO and Co-founder, Dr. Brenton Cooper, highlights OSINT innovations from the latest release of our flagship OSINT solution, Fivecast ONYX.
Analysts and intelligence teams today have a really tough job and face many challenges as they strive to protect global communities. These evolving challenges (both new and old) include a constantly changing threat landscape, exacerbated in recent times by increased geopolitical and domestic unrest, as well as an explosion in the volume of online communications platforms across the Surface, Deep, and Dark Web which tech-savvy threat actors have easy access to.
With intelligence investigations increasing in complexity, there is a clear recognition that open-source intelligence plays an essential role in rapidly uncovering threats and solving intelligence challenges.
As part of our ongoing commitment to furthering OSINT best practices and helping customers across law enforcement, defense, national security, and the private sector address some of the world’s most important challenges, we’ve recently released version 8 of our flagship solution, Fivecast ONYX. The V8 release adds extra horsepower (pun intended) to our core capabilities around advanced data collection and AI-enabled risk analytics to provide a robust OSINT framework for analysts and intelligence teams to manage and monitor the constantly changing online threat landscape.
OSINT AI and Machine Learning Innovations
One of the many trends our team has identified over the last 12 months is an expansion in the range of media being used in online communications by threat actors. In addition to the more traditional text posts, keywords, and quotes, there is the broad usage of logos, images, memes, and videos being used across many platforms. Therefore, an increasingly important part of an effective OSINT framework is AI-enabled media analytics that can identify threats and risks across a range of online multimedia data including text, keywords, phrases, and increasingly, images, logos, and videos.
AI and machine learning have a key role to play in helping supercharge analyst teams detect risks across large volumes of unstructured multi-media data. To that end, Fivecast has built on our existing advanced AI and machine learning models in this release to expand capabilities for detecting risky multi-media content with user-trainable image, logo, and text detectors to find specific objects and concepts meaningful to investigations.
Making OSINT intuitive and accessible
As we introduce new OSINT innovations, we continually focus on ensuring the accessibility and usability of AI and machine learning-enabled features. This supports our core belief that the main role of AI and machine learning in OSINT should be to make the job of analysts and intelligence teams, who are often under-resourced, easier without requiring data science skills to leverage this technology effectively. The Fivecast user-trainable AI models in the V8 release are accessible and intuitive, delivering the power to create customized risk detection frameworks that are meaningful to specific investigations. Combining the human expertise of the analyst with advanced AI algorithms, Fivecast ONYX can automatically train the AI models – learning, tuning, and optimizing in the background to increase their capabilities over time.
An effective OSINT framework
These AI-enabled OSINT innovations combined with advanced data collection and discovery capabilities across an expanded range of online platforms deliver a powerful, customizable risk detection framework that builds a rich intelligence picture and speeds up investigations across the broad and complex online environment.
I invite you to reach out to our expert Tradecraft team at tradecraft@fivecast.com to find out more and request a demo on how Fivecast can help you monitor and manage the challenging threat landscape and successfully progress your most important missions.
Advanced open-source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities can provide analysts with the actionable insights from open-source platforms needed to effectively address these challenges while identifying and monitoring transnational organized crime groups operating or communicating online.
Fivecast ONYX is a threat intelligence framework that combines broad data collection across the Surface, Deep, and Dark Web with AI-enabled risk detectors to build a rich intelligence picture around transnational organized crime groups and individuals.
Fivecast ONYX deploys automated collection and risk assessment of masses of multi-media data, enabling analysts to uncover threats regardless of a group’s organizational structure, reach or influence across multiple countries. The solution enables the identification of previously unknown actors through a built-in Persons of Interest (POI) search, data triage in over 100 languages, and delivers a customizable risk detection framework to detect a wide range of content relevant to investigations in multi-media data.
By leveraging these capabilities, Fivecast ONYX rapidly surfaces networks, uncovers locations and risky behavior regardless of language, or data type enabling intelligence teams to cover more and miss less in the fight against transnational organized crime.
