Social Media Still a Crime Hub

March 14, 2016

It seems that most crime is concentrated on the hidden Dark Web, especially with news of identity thief and potential threats to national security making the news over the latest social media hotspot. Social media is still a hot bed for Internet crime and Motherboard has a little tale tell about, “SocioSpyder: The Tool Bought By The FBI To Monitor Social Media.” Social media remains a popular crime hub, because of the amount of the general public that use it making them susceptible to everything from terroristic propaganda to the latest scam to steal credit card numbers.

Law enforcement officials are well aware of how criminals use social media, but the biggest problem is having to sift through the large data stockpile from the various social media platforms. While some law enforcement officials might enjoy watching the latest cute kitten video, it is not a conducive use of their time. The FBI purchased SocioSpyder as their big data tool.

“ ‘SocioSpyder,’ as the product is called, ‘can be configured to collect posts, tweets, videos and chats on-demand or autonomously into a relational, searchable and graphable database,” according to the product’s website. SocioSpyder is made by Allied Associates International, a US-based contractor for government and military clients as well as other private companies, and which sells, amongst other things, software.

This particular piece of kit, which is only sold to law enforcement or intelligence agencies, allows an analyst to not only keep tabs on many different targets across various social networks at once, but also easily download all of the data and store it. In short, it’s pretty much a pre-configured web scraper for social media.”

SocioSpyder maps relationships within the data and understand how the user-generated content adds up to the bigger picture. Reportedly, the FBI spent $78,000 on the SocioSpyder software and the US Marshals bought a lesser version worth $22,500. SocioSpyder is being used to gather incriminating evidence against criminals and avoid potential crimes.

My biggest question: where can we get a version of SocioSpyder to generate reports for personal use?

Whitney Grace, March 14, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Dark Web, Government, News, Security, Social Media

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.