Silobreaker Highlighted in SC Magazine
August 13, 2014
I have been a fan of Silobreaker’s online system and services for almost a decade. Unlike free online services, Silobreaker provides access to third party content as well as online information. An organization can work with Silobreaker in a variety of ways. The firm provides specialized services to process content for organizations as well as offering licensing deals to meet the needs of business information professionals and government entities.
The SC Magazine article “Soft Intelligence Is Important Too: Silobreaker.” I noted several passages in the story by Peter Stephenson as important to me in my work. The first snippet that I created observes:
With intelligence, especially cyber intelligence, the name of the game is situational awareness. That comes from reading lots of news items, blogs, social media, etc. In fact, Silobreaker does that well – to the tune of around 50,000 sources, more than 300 specific major malwares, thousands of vulnerabilities (from the CVE), and tracking 200-plus hacker groups. Then it applies proprietary algorithms to figure out what it has and to make that content available for a variety of queries, some automated and some manual. Specific target groups – such as various industry sectors – can be followed in conjunction with this raw data, which allows the setting of watch lists.
I am not too keen on the phrase “soft intelligence.” When data contribute to action, the service that provided information delivers something I would not characterize as soft. However, the comment is a good one. I would note that when Silobreaker includes a consultant’s report, what I call mid tier content marketing or saucisson by experts from outfits that emulate IDC-like “reports”, the Silobreaker display provides a context of other information.
I also noted:
Silobreaker can be employed as a SaaS service (Silobreaker Premium) or as a server in one’s enterprise – behind a firewall – as Silobreaker Enterprise Software. In either deployment, the key to the company’s success is in its suite of proprietary algorithms and its deep Internet search capability. We have tested the SaaS version with excellent results and have been able to correlate Silobreaker open source intelligence (OSINT) with bits and bytes from such sources as IP Viking and the SANS Internet Storm Center. That, added to monitored data at our Advanced Computing Center has provided an excellent picture of cyber activity and cyber activity trends. There are multiple ways to collect and analyze Silobreaker data. For example, you can easily create your own dashboard and include only those things that are important to you. You might watch trends within your own industry, trending malware, trending attacks, etc. You can relate those back to your particular business environment. So, we can watch trending attacks, hacker ops and malware that relates particularly to the banking industry, for example.
This is a helpful description of Silobreaker. I would point out that Silobreaker incorporates a number of features that other systems available to organizations struggle to implement in a context sensitive way; for example, a map that pinpoints an entity in a specific geographic area.
I too find Silobreaker’s trending functions quite useful. SC Magazine says:
Trending is the key analysis tool. Things happen. They don’t usually happen in isolation, but sometimes they do. What is important, though, are the trends that we can use predicatively to help erect proactive defenses. Silobreaker generates trend information using heat and time series. These show, graphically, the trends over whatever time period you want. Heat shows within one day or one week at time series set by you. The system uses a 360-degree analysis approach that looks at the interactions between trending items, rather than looking at them in isolation.
Again I would point out that the “last known location function” and the “at a glance” reports that can be used in a meeting are also outstanding. Silobreaker includes a robust searching system too. Very important. Recommended.
For more information, visit www.silobreaker.com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 13, 2014
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