Recorded Future Suggested for Cyber Attack Prediction
July 12, 2012
Oh, oh, scary marketing. Careful, the goose is easily startled. Sys-Con Media claims our attention with “Recorded Future for Forecasting Cyber Attacks.” Blogger Bob Gourley does a good job, though, of explaining why Recorded Future would be a good tool for predicting cyber attacks.
Already employed by agencies such as the US Southern Command, Recorded Future has been successfully used to anticipate citizen unrest and to analyze intelligence stored on a private cloud (the Bin Laden Letters, no less.) The software automates the aggregation and organization of data, leaving more time for human analysts to focus on assessment. The application presents the information collected from articles, blog posts, and/or tweets chronologically, including (this is the best part) a prediction of future events. The software also helps with the analysis stage by mapping relationships and tracking buzz.
Gourley asserts that the company’s technology can also be used in the struggle against international hackers:
“All together, these capabilities allow an organization to forecast more accurately whether they will be the target of a major cyber attacks and what threat vectors they should most worry about. Within minutes, analysts could see if there has been a trend of attacks against similar organizations, any threats reported online, or events likely to trigger attacks coming up. They can drill down into coverage by blogs or trade journals if they find the mainstream media insufficient or misleading, and map out the interactions and relationships between hacking groups, companies, government agencies, and law enforcement. While Recorded Future can’t tell you who will attack you and when, it makes open source intelligence intelligence analysis for cybersecurity easier, faster, and more effective.”
Still in the start-up phase, Recorded Future has headquarters in Cambridge, MA, and Göteborg, Sweden. Staffed with statisticians, linguists, and technical business pros as well as computer scientists, the company seems well-equipped to deliver what they call “the world’s first temporal analytics engine.”
Cynthia Murrell, July 12, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
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A way to to this without RF is to determine the target stories that become sanitized over time. Example: the Evanston and Lemont siren incident June 30. The links may be inaccessible but the snippets are there if you know how to find them. I wonder if MGM of the local DHSEM, for example, is aware of that. And with regard to RF – I would think that the method outlined here is somewhat counter-intuitive to their own.