How will economic uncertainty, shrinking budgets, automation, ethical concerns impact OSINT? Top trends and predictions in OSINT from Skopenow, DarkOwl CEOs

Top trends and predictions in OSINT from Skopenow, DarkOwl CEOs

During this year and beyond, OSINT is expected to continue its quick development and evolution across various industries in a push to disrupt crime, fraud and threats, but what are the key factors that will influence this development? On March 14, Rob Douglas, Co-Founder & CEO of Skopenow, and Mark Turnage, Co-Founder & CEO of DarkOwl held a webinar (transcript here) where they identified eight trends in OSINT. Here is a summary of the two OSINT experts’ very interesting discussion.

Trend 1: Economic Uncertainty: Heightened Pressure to Commit Crimes

According to Rob Douglas, financial pressure will lead to an increase in individuals who will sell sensitive company data on the darkweb. “So in the United States, there’s pressure because you have a lot of tech companies that have a lot of information letting go of important employees who either are gonna commit a crime not related to the business, but related to anything to solve for the fact that they don’t have an income, to taking information that they shouldn’t be proliferating and putting it out there on the open web,” Douglas said.

According to Mark Turnage, there is an increase in just pure fraud, as criminals try and take advantage of the downturn in the economy. Also, the Russia and Ukraine war lead to some criminal gangs splitting up, and now these gangs are looking for new ways to monetize their posture, moving towards the area of insider information. “So it’s a vicious circle. When you start with an employee, as Rob said, who has access to data that is highly sensitive and highly valuable in the wrong hands, and you add in the darknet and you add in criminal elements that are looking to monetize that. It’s a potential recipe for disaster,” Turnage said.

Trend 2: Cost Cutting: Security and Investigations Teams Facing Reduced Budgets

As companies are looking to save money and minimize costs, some of them are cutting security-related budgets and are demanding higher value for every dollar spent, according to Mark Turnage. On that note, there are more and more requests to automate some component of the OSINT investigation, integrating it to their processes and platforms., he added. Also, as companies cut costs and cut corners, they become softer targets for criminals.

However, there is an opportunity for a “natural selection”, following the cost optimisation process, Rob Douglas pointed out, as increased competition will lead to better solutions and products.

Trend 3: Data for Sale: Breaches Continue to Grow in Size and Frequency

As many employees ignore the dangers of using simple passwords or identical passwords for multiple accounts, more data breaches are expected. From an open source practitioner perspective, a password used several times is an extremely valuable open source intelligence data point because you can now find an individual that has, or an account that has absolutely no connection to a person outside of a password, Rob Douglas said.  As there have never been so many leaks like there have been in recent times, this is a unique value add in this scenario, he added.

According to Mark Turnage, it is important for organizations to have some monitoring capability, particularly in the darknet, where most of these breaches are posted and sold, so they know in real time if data and particularly passwords that are relevant to their organization have been posted. “So whatever darkweb monitoring solution you put in place, and frankly it’s an OSINT monitoring solution, because they’re also paste sites and other sites that you need to monitor. It has to be timely, it has to be continual, and it has to be largely automated,” Turnage explained.

Trend 4: Greater Need for Due Diligence: Synthetic Identity Fraud Continues to Grow

The synthetic identity is actually a fake identity composed of legitimate elements taken from different identities, Mark Turnage explains. According to Rob Douglas, data proliferation makes it very easy to copy an identity because if you have a phone number that’s out there or an email address that’s out there, you have two critical points of Personal Identifying Information (PII) that can be utilized to create a fictitious account or even a synthetic identity. “There’s a few things you can do to combat this, and it’s not just plugging away, but one direct way of looking at individuals that are, let’s call it copycatting, a phone number or email or identity, is by reversing those phone numbers using automated solutions,” he added. When looking into a specific case, you need to look at a singular phone number that’s disassociated from an email address, so data points that are unique, Skopenow CEO added. “Because as soon as you start combining those details, it starts creating kind of a wish-washy connection profile for identifying profiles that are, that are not gonna be necessarily associated with your subject. So I would be very critical on what data you’re trying to check all upfront,” Douglas added.

Trend 5: New Opportunities: AI/ML’s Expanding Role in the Future of Crime and OSINT

ChatGPT is an extremely useful tool for OSINT researchers and analysts, but it can also help you to learn and understand, for example, the foundations of open-source intelligence, Rob Douglas explained. On the other side, it can be used for other purposes, such as phishing. “The first thing I thought about when I saw ChatGPT doing that was that Nigerian Prince schemes are gonna get way more sophisticated. Because if you’re sitting there trying to do a phishing scheme, for example, on a company and ChatGPT can do the research on who you’re targeting and what they’re targeting and put it in the appropriate voice, they just got a lot more sophisticated at zero cost to the criminals,” Mark Turnage said. “And I fully expect that we will see real frauds, real schemes coming from criminals where they are using AI,” he added.

Trend 6: Growing Ethical Concerns: Complex Legal and Regulatory Challenges Further Complicate OSINT

The issue of mobile advertising identifiers (MAIDs) and location is a growing problem for Google and especially Facebook, according to Rob Douglas. “So you have customers that have agreed to share locations on applications that don’t realize that their data is exposed and being shared. So I wanted to be clear about the fact that we only use data that was publicly available and purposefully published,” he said. The Facebook issue has become a growing open source intelligence challenge. “Facebook doesn’t want data being exposed for obvious reasons, but the value of that data and their revenue opportunities are becoming much smaller because the same problem that’s associated with location analysis and location data is plaguing Facebook’s ability to deploy advertisements. So it’s a full circle situation where you have an organization changing the way that their entire revenue model works based on privacy laws and that impacts the industry. And that trickles down to Skopenow,” he explained. On the topic of usable PII, Rob Douglas mentions ancestry.com as one of the most powerful tools he has ever used, due to the amount and the specificity of information there.

Rvrn though DarkOwl has different challenges from this point of view, because it actually holds data, the company is extremely ethical in how it collects data, CEO Mark Turnage said. “We don’t buy data, we don’t go behind firewalls. We collect data that is publicly available to anyone who’s in the darknet. We store that data under highly secure conditions, and we only make it available to people and clients who have a legitimate purpose to search for that data and then to make that data actionable.

Trend 7: Ditching Browser Extensions: Upgrading to Dedicated Investigation Tools for Court-Ready OSINT

The two OSINT experts highlight the importance of having a process in place for gathering, using and preserving data, regarddless if they’re doing a manual investigation using tools or an automated solution. “We at DarkOwl are collecting an enormous amount of data on a daily basis and archiving that data. And critical in our archiving, and it has been used in court is the metadata that we collect with that, when did we DarkOwl collect it, at what time, from what site. And that metadata can be established under oath and we have experts who can testify to that,” Mark Turnage said. “That’s just a tiny sliver of what you have to be able to do if you are going to use OSINT data in a court of law because a good defense lawyer will try to take you down any time on any piece of that evidence. So there are definitely complexities here and using a browser extension is not the way to go if you are going to be doing this in anticipation of a criminal prosecution,” he added.

Trend 8: More Visibility: OSINT will be Championed by the Intelligence Community and Others

“The US government has repeatedly and loudly proclaimed that they have OSINT religion now, after years of ignoring it and OSINT data. So we are seeing a real move by the US government and the intelligence community, not only in the US but in other Western countries too to obtain and use OSINT data much more carefully in their own efforts,” Mark Turnage said, pointing out to Bellingcat as an example of a company that uses, or organization that uses open source intelligent, good effect in tracing activities.

According to Rob Douglas, there is an obvious trend towards spending within the government on open source intelligence solutions, not necessarily even just for investigations, but for critical oversight in infrastructures and just any sort of developments that are occurring as it pertains to, such as weather, like evolving natural disasters or any sort of information. “I think there’s gonna be continued investment in open source intelligence and a lot of new products and technologies that are coming out there,” he added.

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Author: OSINT NEWS

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