Intelligence and Security Trends for 2020 and Beyond

The overarching security trend for 2020 is integration.

By integrating a combination of new technologies, security organisations can create a more powerful intelligence structure that makes collection and analysis much more efficient, improving performance and response rate.

So, what are the key integrable trends to consider when developing your security strategy in 2020 and beyond?

More Automation

The concepts of artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming sectors across the globe, with security being no exception.

With the constant and rapid advancement of the online world, it’s becoming easier to get an almost real-time picture of what’s happening globally. But because of this, the amount of data available to intelligence analysts is ever-increasing and it’s becoming more difficult for analysts to detect critical information before it’s too late. The need for data mining technology is becoming more and more crucial to open source collection.

Data mining is the process of sorting through large sets of data in order to identify new and important information. From a security perspective, it’s now possible to automate this process using machine learning. Algorithms can be developed in order to scrape key data from open sources in order to pinpoint threats, emerging situations or a pattern within a series of incidents.

There are several data mining tools available to organisations that gather large amounts of data from publicly available databases such as Twitter or other social media platforms. These tools provide teams with more automation, allowing analysts to focus on interpretation and analysis, rather than simply collecting and processing data for dissemination.

Data mining technology can differ quite significantly, however. Some tools solely mine information from one source, i.e. social media. With these solutions, the machine has been trained to look out for key words and phrases that may indicate an incident has occurred, or is evolving. With news of many significant incidents being broken on the likes of Twitter, this can offer almost instant alerts for security teams.

Often, this information is directly disseminated to users of the tool, without any validation or checks to ensure that the data is a legitimate incident and isn’t a consequence of another growing intelligence trend, fake news.

It’s important that security and intelligence teams don’t exclusively rely on data mining tools to give them a complete and accurate picture of the threat landscape. Without human moderation, organisations can be inundated with large amounts of incidents, many of which may be irrelevant or false. Plus, most providers scrape from merely social media channels, potentially missing significant reports from other online sources.

Intelligence Fusion have designed a unique solution to data mining in order to combat the challenges that relying on machine learning for threat intelligence can present. Our own technology has been built to collect incidents from social media, multi-language media and thousands of other online sources.

Every piece of data identified by the algorithms is first verified by a team of Senior Intelligence Analysts before it’s disseminated to our clients. Ensuring the accuracy and actionability of each alert.

 

The Wisdom of the Crowd

Crowdsourcing intelligence is the concept of obtaining information and knowledge from those on the ground in order to gather a diverse range of insights as a situation evolves. Using these insights, analysts and security teams can garner a consensus of what happened, piece together timelines and understand the wider impact of an incident.

The trend of crowdsourcing has been around for a while, gaining momentum with platforms such as Wikipedia, but more recently becoming more mainstream in the intelligence sector.

But how will this security trend evolve in 2020 and beyond?

The next generation of crowdsourcing intelligence comes as artificial intelligence makes further advances in the industry. Using the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ we can start to train the machines to be more accurate in their identification of incidents.

As well as using humans to enhance the capabilities of artificial intelligence, some organisations are developing tools to analyse humans; identifying patterns, biases and even blind spots in crowdsourced data.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) recently launched a new project which integrates human knowledge and machine learning to improve the timeliness and accuracy when forecasting geopolitical events and maintaining global security.

Their website states; “Human-generated forecasts may be subject to cognitive biases and/or scalability limits. Machine-generated forecasting approaches may be more scalable and data-driven, but are often ill-suited to render forecasts for idiosyncratic or newly emerging geopolitical issues. Hybrid approaches hold promise for combining the strengths of these two approaches while mitigating their individual weaknesses.”

With the introduction of Intelligence Fusion’s Freemium Map, which will allow users to submit incidents to our analysts for moderation, we’ll create a significant crowdsourced network and consequently, a far larger, more consistent data set. Clients will also benefit from deeper context and a more local insight.

Moderating a crowdsourced incident will include grading each user for credibility and reliability, combating fake news and eliminating false reports from being uploaded to our platform. It also allows our analysts to know who can be tapped into for further information or insight during our intelligence collection process.

 

Enhanced Visualisation

Monitoring real-time data through dynamic maps is the cornerstone of Intelligence Fusion’s service. We provide various visualisations in order to represent the data in a multitude of ways and add additional context to intelligence. The more insight we can provide, the more informed an analyst’s decision will be.

But how can we make situational awareness and threat response even more intuitive?

Integrating 3D visualisation with a stream of real-time intelligence can help security stakeholders extract further value by improving the conception of incidents, evolving situations and changing conditions across the globe. A more pragmatic representation of a landscape through 3D mapping reveals a more complete scene, allowing users to better correlate events and interpret consequences.

This additional layer of context will ultimately allow analysts to assess and react more quickly to any threats.

We can even take it one step further and consider virtual reality (VR) in threat intelligence. This level of augmentation can be used across security, defense and intelligence industries from simulation and training to in-action or remote navigation through high-risk areas.

Integrating new levels of visualisation into a platform such as Intelligence Fusion allows users to operate in a virtual workspace, surrounded by tactical data and visualised in 360 degrees. This data can include historic incidents, patterns of events as well as live or ongoing situations to enhance situational awareness and perception.

Intelligence Fusion are both pragmatic and innovative in our approach to development and progression. We’re constantly identifying new technologies and approaches to intelligence collection in order to create the ultimate solution for our clients.

Our technology is award-winning and we were recently recognised as one of the most exciting tech businesses in the North East. And we’re only just getting started.

If you’d like to find out more about the intelligence solution transforming the security industry, get in touch for your free demonstration.