New Trends In Open Source Intelligence Gathering
February 6, 2010 11:07 pm BusinessIf you run a business, are a researcher, or are a private investigator you probably already understand the importance of the field of open source intelligence gathering. Many tools to collect information from publicly available sources have come on the market over the past couple of years making open source intelligence gathering easier than ever before.
Even free versions of software like Maltego have changed the landscape of a field once relegated to the realm of technowizards and geeks. Now business people, librarians, and private investigators all have quick and easy access to data that otherwise would have taken them weeks or even months to collect.
In particular this has been a tremendous boon to federal law enforcement making it much easier for them to track down connections between entities in cross-border crime by running statistical analysis against groups of email addresses, analyzing hosting and domain name histories, and checking for shared name servers and analytical tracking codes. In fact connections between entities in a recent home business fraud operation were quickly made through such tools.
Librarians use the data to verify the legitimacy of their sources, although they still rely on their professional training for final analysis of the data and information they find.
Marketers can use open source intelligence gathering to study and monitor their competitors. They can look for new market opportunities and potentially uncover new areas of revenue growth by searching for market segments their competitors are in that they are not in yet.
Surprisingly, real-time search has become an important new development in the field of open source intelligence. Why? Because many times the major search engines will remove questionable websites from their index and those very same websites may hold the key to tying together pieces of a criminal organization. Both the websites ReadWriteWeb and AltSearchEnginesToday are great places to keep up with both new developments in real time search as well as the current players in the field of vertical search.
Right now the field of open source intelligence gathering is still somewhat loosely organized and many of the experts in the field have no real formal training in the area. In fact many breakthroughs in the field come from using tools in ways that they were not necessarily originally designed for.
The field is still young, but new attention is being paid to it now that the commercial importance of the field is better understood and now that open source intelligence gathering tools are more user friendly and easier to find.
