Fivecast CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Brenton Cooper draws on his interactions with Fivecast customers to outline key OSINT trends for 2025 and how Fivecast is innovating to address the many challenges and support successful intelligence missions across the globe.
Osint: A game changer in modern intelligence
Over the past few years, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) has matured significantly, becoming a critical component of intelligence strategies for the Government and Corporate sectors to automate data collection and analysis for an increasingly varied range of use cases.
The rapid growth of open-source data, combined with the dynamic nature of the online world, presents a significant intelligence challenge for organizations and governments tasked with protecting communities and businesses.
The U.S. Army recognized OSINT as an intelligence discipline of the first resort, prioritizing its use in future operations. They join a host of other large agencies, government departments, financial institutions, and corporations that have also recognized the benefits. OSINT works in conjunction with other intelligence disciplines, providing several benefits, such as identifying hidden threats in publicly and commercially available data sources, filtering huge volumes of data that are impossible to process manually, and being less resource- intensive. This allows intelligence investigations to progress in a timely manner, helping organizations achieve their missions. OSINT is faster and less expensive than manual processes, making it an invaluable tool in the intelligence community.
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OSINT Trends for 2025
The increasing complexity of global threats across law enforcement, defense, national security, financial, and corporate security sectors demands more sophisticated intelligence solutions. Here are some key trends and challenges for 2025:
THE NEED FOR SPEED
- A recurring concern from many in the intelligence community I’ve spoken with over the last year has been the need to perform intelligence investigations faster to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated threat actors and rapidly evolving threat landscapes. In particular, there is a strong need to speed up the crucial initial stages of an intelligence investigation, including digital footprinting, information verification, and identity resolution.
- Faster insights earlier in the intelligence cycle help analysts frame the focus of an investigation before assessing if and what further analysis is required and are essential to ensure efficient use of stretched and often underfunded intelligence resources. Across huge and diverse data sources, however, speeding up the initial discovery stage of an investigation is not easy to do. Responding directly to our customers’ concerns and priorities, Fivecast launched a Discovery solution in 2024 that enables fast, broad, and intuitive search and discovery across a vast range of publicly and commercially available data sources.
NAVIGATING THE BIG DATA CHALLENGE
The rapid growth of data generation continues to present a significant challenge. From 2020 to 2024, global online data grew from 64 zettabytes to 147 zettabytes and is forecasted to reach 394 zettabytes by 2028.
Extracting valuable intelligence from open-source data is increasingly challenging due to the constantly growing volume, velocity, and variety of data. While abundant data offers potential benefits, filtering and analyzing it is extremely difficult and time-consuming. The rapid pace at which topics emerge, gain popularity, and fade across platforms adds to the complexity of developing an accurate intelligence picture. Additionally, the diverse variety of images, videos, posts, quotes, and texts in multiple languages across constantly changing platforms further complicates the process.
Given this perfect storm of data growth, intelligence teams require access to a broad range of publicly and commercially available data sources and the ability to quickly filter and correlate these sources to deliver the insights needed for complex intelligence use cases.
Fivecast offers unmatched data coverage, expanding on this in 2024 to cover billions of data points across millions of data sources, including news streams, search engines, people and company databases, social media, sanctions, watch lists, foundational networks, the Dark Web, and data leaks.
HARNESSING AI for OSINT excellence
AI and machine learning are now integral to OSINT, automating the collection and analysis of vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. These technologies are essential for handling tasks beyond human scale, enabling the efficient processing of enormous volumes of data.
The use of AI and machine learning in OSINT needs to be designed and deployed within an ethical and responsible framework focusing on bias minimization and explainability of AI and machine learning outputs. Fivecast excels in this area by ensuring that our AI-driven solutions are designed and developed within the principles of responsible and trustworthy AI, emphasizing ethical considerations. Our customizable risk detector frameworks apply AI across vast multimedia datasets, learning and improving over time to quickly identify the most valuable content. Importantly, Fivecast OSINT solutions adhere to the concept of ‘augmented intelligence,’ where AI is used to enhance and not replace the analysis and decision-making of skilled human intelligence analysts.
In 2024, we doubled down on our AI innovation, introducing new features powered by generative AI for our Fivecast MATRIX solution, which is purpose-built for large-scale security vetting and risk assessments. These innovations included customizable screening criteria to streamline and speed up risk assessment and content moderation to mitigate threats further.
Prioritizing data privacy and security
As the use of OSINT continues to grow, it is essential to prioritize data privacy and security, which is a key concern for many of our customers. While the information collected is publicly available on the target platform, it is crucial that the collection and handling of publicly available information comply with legislative and policy requirements. This ensures that the data is collected and used ethically and responsibly.
Data collection should also be proportionate and targeted to ensure its relevance to the mission without drawing in masses of unrelated ‘noise.’ Keeping data secure, restricting access, and maintaining data integrity are all essential considerations when conducting OSINT investigations.
Enhancing threat detection through Trend Analysis
Change detection and trend analysis are critical in making sense of the data tsunami. By deploying scalable, ongoing, repeatable, and consistent data collection techniques, analysts can gain valuable insights into changing narratives, movements, groups, and threat actors and identify trends and changes that may indicate risk. Our customers are able to leverage Fivecast LUNEX – curated foundational networks that provide timely strategic insights into existing and emerging threats, which can be enhanced by automated data collection and analysis for ongoing investigations.
Combining real-time monitoring with historical trend analysis enhances the ability to understand and respond to the growing complexity of global threats. Real-time threat monitoring provides immediate, actionable insights, allowing for swift responses to emerging risks.
Fivecast: leading the way in Osint solutions
Fivecast’s market-leading open-source intelligence solution suite covers the end-to-end intelligence lifecycle, seamlessly increasing the visibility of your targets without requiring additional skilled staff.
Fivecast ONYX: Fast, broad, and intuitive Discovery through to deep ongoing collection and AI-enabled risk analysis, Fivecast ONYX is the analyst force multiplier you need to uncover essential intelligence insights quickly.
Fivecast LUNEX: Delivering enhanced performance and scalability, Fivecast LUNEX provides strategic insights into rich foundational networks. The solution covers existing, new, and emerging threats, curated by our intelligence-trained Tradecraft professionals.
Fivecast MATRIX: Addressing the challenges inherent in huge volumes of screening and vetting tasks, Fivecast MATRIX is built for large scale risk assessments delivering an intuitive workflow, automated account resolution, and configurable analytics.
In 2025, the team at Fivecast will continue to pioneer cutting-edge OSINT solutions, deploying the latest tools and innovations to support our global customers and partners. Our commitment to advancing OSINT technology ensures we remain at the forefront of creating a safer world.
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