Fivecast
Lighting up the Dark Web with OSINT Solutions

The popularity of social media platforms and the online community has been one of the significant trends in 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic restricted people’s movement in the physical world, they took to the virtual realm to stay connected with their friends, families, and communities. But on the slightly murkier side of this trend, these virtual meeting places are fast becoming a platform of choice for cyberterrorists and extremist groups. And when crime moves online, law enforcement agencies must follow leads and conduct investigations seamlessly between the physical and digital worlds.

In this regard, open-source intelligence (OSINT) represents both opportunities and challenges for law enforcement agencies. OSINT has the ability to help law enforcement agencies monitor online user behavior across surface, deep, and dark web. It can thus assist in preventing a plethora of crimes from happening. However, the challenges of OSINT are around the huge volume of data. Given the increasing number of social platforms and the growing user-base, there is currently a data deluge that law enforcement officials are dealing with. As a result, the data volume and data accessibility challenges are making it difficult for law enforcement agencies to zero in on the critical data insights they need to efficiently initiate and progress investigations in time.

So how can law enforcement agencies efficiently manage and track people’s online behavior and proactively prevent any crime from happening?

Bearing an answer to this pertinent question, the company that is now helping law enforcement agencies leverage OSINT is Fivecast. As a world-leading provider of cutting-edge digital intelligence solutions, Fivecast arms law enforcement organizations with the capability to explore masses of digital data, gaining insights that are critical in protecting communities. Through this, Fivecast positions itself at the forefront of new technologies leading the evolution of OSINT and taking the fight to those threatening the way of life. “We have automated the collection and analysis of publicly available information people have willingly posted on the internet for law enforcement agencies,” says Dr. Brenton Cooper, co-founder and CEO of Fivecast.

How It All Began…

Interestingly, the history of Fivecast can be traced to the big data-related challenges around OSINT. Fivecast was founded in 2017 as a spin-out from the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Center (CRC) in Adelaide, South Australia. CRC was a five-year collaboration between Australia’s national security agencies and various research organizations, to tackle the big data challenges facing national security and law enforcement. “This enriched history offers Fivecast a great advantage as we can easily understand the demands and challenges of OSINT big data management,” mentions Dr. Cooper.

Driven by this experience, Fivecast has recently developed its flagship OSINT solution—Fivecast ONYX. The advanced data collection and AI-enabled risk detection framework of Fivecast ONYX delivers actionable insights from masses of unstructured data that can be critical for tracking threat actors across platforms and websites and supporting investigation outcomes. Law enforcement agencies can thus add a new layer of intelligence with Fivecast ONYX as it searches chat rooms, social media, online marketplaces, and the dark web for ‘the needle in the haystack’ or the hidden threat factors disguised as a benevolent netizen. Fivecast ONYX gathers and interprets images, texts, videos, and concepts in multiple languages and platforms to create meaningful connections, uncover networks, and deliver critical insights in real-time. The OSINT solution can also build links between networks, groups, and similar entities, providing a powerful tool to scan, detect, and investigate potential safety and security risks. What’s more? “Fivecast Onyx data collection and analysis system can be configured by the law enforcement officials to look at particular data collections from the murky depths of the internet. They can look for particular risks or searches, like certain images used to represent certain anti-authoritarian groups,” adds Dr. Cooper.

The success of Fivecast ONYX is now pushing the company to assume a more prominent role beyond the confines of only the Australian territory. “We now have three major customers in the U.S., including a large federal law enforcement agency, and we’re working on signing up another major client,” shares Dr. Cooper. Besides, Fivecast has also won an Australian Defense Global Competitiveness Grant to create an online training academy. And with these recognitions, Fivecast is now looking to serve new markets and support continued growth with the mission of enabling a safer world.