In this blog, a Fivecast Tradecraft advisor outlines how OSINT helps address security vetting challenges with a focus on identity resolution. Read on to explore how Fivecast solutions address this challenge.
Big Data Impact on Security Vetting
The most significant challenge investigators and analyst teams face when conducting security vetting and risk assessment at scale is identifying risk across masses of diverse data sources and content.
Here’s a stat for you that outlines the big data challenge – the total amount of online data created and consumed globally grew from 64 to 120 zettabytes between 2020 and 2023 and is forecast to reach 181 Zettabytes by 2025. (source: statista.com). Extracting valuable intelligence from open-source data is increasingly challenging due to the constantly increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data available.
Data Volume – The reality of our increasingly online lives has resulted in a tsunami of data feeds being available for intelligence purposes. While this means potentially more useful data is available to analysts at their fingertips, it makes the task of monitoring and filtering data to identify what’s important extremely difficult and time-consuming.
Data Velocity – The warp speed at which topics of conversation arise, gain popularity, and then decline across platforms significantly increases complexity when developing an intelligence picture.
Data Variety –The unlimited variety of images, videos, posts, quotes, and texts, all in multiple languages and posted across increasingly diverse and changing platforms adds complexity to the challenge.
Manual Vs. Automated Identity Resolution
There are many steps involved in vetting and screening processes; however, identity resolution is often the most time-consuming process. Simply finding an individual’s relevant social media accounts is a significant task. Discovering all the potential accounts across several platforms and then searching relevant posts and metadata to confirm identity is time-consuming. This is all done while analysts must discount unlikely hits and deal with the uncertainty that accounts have been missed. Add in juggling multiple obfuscated accounts for each platform and data security, and completing this task manually for potentially dozens of targets can be overwhelming for a lone analyst or a small team.
Fivecast delivers two solutions to help intelligence teams enhance identity resolution processes, depending on their use cases:
Fivecast ONYX – AI-Enabled Deep Investigation:
Fivecast ONYX solves frustrating issues that come with identity resolution. Conducting identity resolution within a unified solution, you can search across 300+ platforms and over 28 billion data points, all in one place. This reduces the need to jump from multiple platforms to discover potential accounts. Additionally, all searching can be done within Fivecast ONYX, meaning analysts do not need to manually navigate social media platforms, reducing security issues with obfuscated online identities and risk exposure. Once identity resolution is complete, analysts can easily collect relevant data and conduct AI-enabled analysis on the accounts discovered, simplifying and creating consistency within an investigation.
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Fivecast MATRIX – automated Large Scale Identity Resolution:
Fivecast MATRIX has been purpose-built for conducting large-scale, automated risk assessments and screening programs. Once the scale of vetting increases, and analysts must assess dozens of targets a day, if not more, a manual process soon becomes impossible.
The solution enables a single analyst to assess hundreds of targets by streamlining and automating the identity resolution process while allowing for analyst input and control. The true value of a tool like Fivecast MATRIX is seen by its ability to reduce manual searching, proven to be over 20 times faster than manual account resolution. Superior to manually searching for each target, analysts can input all the relevant identifying data. Conduct automatic identity resolution on everyone, accurately selecting accounts that match defined risk parameters.
Request the Case Study: Fivecast Matrix – Driving Vetting Efficiency
With Fivecast MATRIX, analysts can fine-tune the value of specific data points and other factors used as matching details to ensure each target is identified and collected. For example, if conducting vetting on a military population, Fivecast MATRIX can search metadata for mentions of military service and also review photos and other media for camouflage or military hardware. All of this can be manually verified by the analyst/investigator.
Seamlessly pivot to Fivecast ONYX deep collection and AI-enabled analysis generating detailed entity reports for each target. The identity resolution, collection, analysis, and reporting can all be done automatically, while analysts spend their limited time reviewing reports and making final decisions.
With an automated tool like Fivecast MATRIX, a single analyst can conduct deep analysis at a scale that would require dozens of manual analyst resources. The power of Fivecast MATRIX was highlighted in a recent customer POC, where the solution was proven to cut down vetting time from 1 week to 2 hours.
conclusion
Manual OSINT investigation and personnel vetting add complexity and reduce analyst/investigator resources, increasing costs for the organization. Account identification, data analysis, and vetting volumes make manual checking overwhelming and inefficient, requiring automated support. Fivecast ONYX and Fivecast MATRIX solutions enable automated identity resolution via AI-enabled deep investigation and large-scale identity vetting. Generating the automated retrieval of relevant data, driving analyst/investigator productivity, and reducing complexity when conducting online investigations.
