Cybercrime is steadily on the rise, and it appears that everyone knows a friend where their computer or bank balance has been compromised or hacked. Trying to find the perpetrators has often been likened to finding a needle in a haystack, blindfold!
The challenge for analysts and law enforcement is to conduct a thorough but efficient cybercrime investigation process that concludes successfully and within a time window.
Given that cybercrime can vary from fraud to human trafficking and personal information theft to cyber terrorism, the pressure is directly on the shoulders of analysts to call it right, and quickly.
Add to that, cyber threat actors are now very tech-savvy. They are highly aware of knowing how to exploit a computer’s weakness and, at the same time, cover their digital footprints to avoid exposure.
Fortunately for analysts and researchers, many cybercrime investigation tools can outpace the threat actor, track them down, identify them, extract quality data of activity and provide a timely warning of the threats.
The best web intelligence platform solutions are built with AI crime prediction tools that make sense of all the big data an analyst needs to monitor and often identify connections between threat actors, their circle, and any unusual online behavior.
Systems now come with overlaid intelligence cycles, allowing security professionals to bring together and make sense of disparate intelligence data points, creating a rich, colorful and holistic map of vulnerabilities, threats, and potential breaches.
These insights all help maintain effective protection of employees, executives, and information – whether at work, home, or anywhere along the way.
Continuous monitoring and indexing of the dark web provide seamless connectivity to thousands of dark web sources. A robust platform will also enable analysts to search people and keywords to evaluate and monitor forums and markets.
Extracting the intelligence can be tedious, and with criminals or terrorists trying to hide their past criminal history, finding threat actors’ digital footprints, which would connect the dots as well as uncover new leads, the process can be time-consuming.
But sophisticated AI algorithms are now being deployed to analyze collected data and provide deeper insights in real-time. Dark web monitoring also allows investigators to launch investigations with the smallest piece of digital forensics information, such as a threat actor’s name, location, IP address, or image.
Publicly available intelligence, such as those available through database searches that aggregate information and have a quick turnaround rate, can be cost-effective for some organizations. But open-source searches may not provide all the necessary data which a criminal investigation on the dark web can produce.
Software platforms, underpinned by methodologies that meet the requirements of law enforcement agencies across the globe, allow cases to be solved in minimum amounts of time with limited resources.
These AI-led search engines are capable of sifting through an infinite amount of critical data across all layers of the internet, including open source and the dark web, at an unmatched pace.
Using these advanced engines, officials can search for threat actors and, at a click, uncloak the identities of the threat actors; extract relevant metadata along with location history, web content history, social connections, and more.
While cybercrime is here to stay, so sophisticated digital forensics are quickly turning the tide in favor of law enforcement to be able to unmask malicious activities and the threat actors in quick time.
