The Pivotal Role of OSINT for Effective Emergency Management
If an organization wants to prepare an effective response to an evolving threat landscape and better protect both their assets and employees they need to have effective intelligence for emergency management.
An emergency incident can happen at any time, often with very little warning. If an organization wants to prepare an effective response to an evolving threat landscape and better protect both their assets and employees they need to have efficient mitigation and response measures in place.
Data and intelligence form a pivotal role in emergency management. They allow security and event management teams to discover threats and accurately assess the associated risk levels. With this knowledge, they can enact an appropriate response to remove employees from harm’s way and prevent potential damages to the organization.
Data Performs a Vital Role in Emergency Management
Some of the ways data and intelligence gathered using Signal OSINT can be used include:
Better Situational Awareness. Save time and lives by rounding out your situational awareness with commentary, photos and videos posted online by the public and media.
Misinformation Management. Catch and manage the spread of misinformation in real-time before it spreads to the public and puts lives at risk, wasting precious time and resource.
Improved Agency Collaboration. Get a better view of what other agencies are doing during an emergency to ensure you allocate people effectively.
Geo-targeted Risk Assessment. Keep an eye on areas of interest, such as near a location of an event you’re hosting, and watch for disruptions such as extreme weather or terrorist threats near your offices.
Threats, Hazards, and Risks.
There are three main types of threats and hazards. First, natural hazards. This includes extreme weather such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires. These can cause extensive disruptions to a business. Such events are often seasonal and organizations should monitor for them during high risk months.
Secondly, technological hazards. These include power outages and infrastructure failures. For example, your business might be affected by your internet provider going down temporarily, or transport links might be disrupted meaning employees are unable to get to work.
And thirdly, man-made hazards. These include cyber-attacks and data breaches, terrorist threats or threats against assets or executives. These can happen at any time, however, often you can find indications on data sources such as darknet forums before the event.
The Importance of Assessing Risks Appropriately
The more data and information you have the more accurately you can assess the risk level of an emerging threat. For example, you might use Signal to set up real-time alerts on an evolving threat like spreading wildfires. This allows you to continually reassess and determine in a timely manner when or if you need to take action to ensure your staff are removed from harms way. However, there is a fine balance between under and over protection.
The Risk of Over-protection
Over-protection is when you initiate responses either too early or too extreme. Erring on the side of caution is always a good idea when it come to protecting employees, however, it can be costly and inefficient.
Over-protection is often caused by the following:
Personal interpretation of the threat level.
Not having enough data to form an accurate assessment.
Not having enough alert levels to allow a staged escalation of measures appropriate for the evolving risk level.
The Risk of Under-protection
Just as with over-protection, under-protection will inhibit the effectiveness of your emergency management response. This can place employees unnecessarily in harms way and means you will be unable to appropriately respond to a threat. The end result of under-protection is invariably higher than necessary associated costs.
To prevent under-protection there are several things that an organization can do:
Provide clear guidance on risk levels of certain threats and make the response increase easy to implement.
Continually assess and reassess the evolving threat landscape and update your alert level guidance accordingly.
Other Emergency Risk Management Considerations
We have already mentioned alert levels a couple of times in this article. This is because having clear guidelines and properly gradated alert levels will allow you to respond effectively and efficiently to crises.
Additionally, your employees should be aware of your response plans, especially to common threats. For example, if your officers are located in an earthquake prone area, have regular earthquake drills.
Finally, should an emergency happen you need an efficient way to communicate the danger to your employees and instigate the appropriate response.
Signal and Emergency Management
Up to the Minute Intel
Emergencies happen without warning. Signal is flexible and fast allowing you to react effectively to the situation.
Prevent Misinformation
Misinformation and media can cause havoc in an emergency. Stay ahead of the noise with a real-time feed of targeted data.
Email and SMS Alerts
Signal has email and SMS alerts which allow you to stay updated on key evolving threats in real-time.
Signal provides hyper-relevant intelligence on evolving threats as or even before they happen. This allows security teams to maximize warning times and enact mitigating measures.
Immediately, this means better protection for staff. This also has additional longer term upsides. For example, it might allow a security team to detect negative sentiment around the brand which allows them to identify and monitor potential threat actors and prevent a threat from evolving. Or, it could allow for a team to have early detection of a data breach, which according to IBM could save an organisation over $600,000.
Vital Protection for the Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals Industry
Some common threats that management and security professionals in the healthcare industry battle with Signal include fake drugs for sale online, sensitive data leaks, and illegal impersonation of healthcare professionals.
Signal is an Open Source Intelligence tool which is used across a number of sectors to help executive and security teams form efficient and effective responses to emerging and evolving threats to assets and people - both staff and customers.
Some of the ways this manifests is in things like quickly identifying data breaches, allowing users to better protect their customers from threats like credential stuffing. Or through social media monitoring to identify sentiment which could affect a businesses reputation or evolve into a physical threat against an executive.
In short, Signal provides relevant, actionable, and real-time information and tools to monitor multiple online data sources with a simple, easy-to-use interface. We empower security professionals around the world to quickly identify emerging threats, receive real-time alerts, and monitor developing situations in order to save time and resources, protect staff and customers, and manage operational risk.
Why use Signal in the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Sector
Management and security professionals in the healthcare industry have particular needs when it comes to protecting assets, staff, and patients. Some common threats include fake drugs for sale online, sensitive data leaks, and illegal impersonation of healthcare professionals.
To prevent the afore mentioned risks and others from evolving into tangible threats healthcare professionals in charge of security need to remain vigilant. Having Signal OSINT software in their toolbox allows them to monitor the dark web for leaked data, scan social media for negative sentiment and monitor other sources to detect threats early.
Private medical data leaks
One of the most worrying things may healthcare institutes have to worry about is hackers targeting sensitive patient data. It is estimated that 24% of dark web vendors offer access to the healthcare vertical market. Over recent years there a has been a resurgence in ransomware and phishing attacks targeting hospitals, medical practices, and nursing homes.
The reason these institutes are so attacked is that digital medical data sets are incredibly rich PPI sources. These records are worth a lot on the black markets of the dark web. Having someones personal medical history allows fraudulent claims and identity theft. It’s important to remember that hackers are trying to generate a positive cash flow from their attacks.
It’s not just medical records then that hackers can get out of a medical institutes system. Often there are non-sensitive login pairs as well as payment and credit card details. Which makes this a gold mine for hackers.
Fake drugs for sale online pharmaceuticals online
The WHO estimates that 50% of the drugs for sale on the internet are fake. Due to the high price of some medications there is ample opportunity for false online vendors to take advantage of the customers need. Often the fake drugs are portrayed as the real thing, but at a massively discounted rate.
Pharmaceutical IT security needs to locate and identify these dangerous sites so that they can be shut down in an effort to protect consumers from potentially harmful fake drugs. It’s also important to identify fake online vendors who might be impersonating a companies brands. This could cause both dangers to customers, but also creates a reputational risk for pharmaceutical companies.
Stopping the Spread of Misinformation
In light of the rapid spread of information following the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19, it has never been more clear that organisations need reliable accurate sources of information. Examples of unqualified individuals selling miracle cures, or spreading misinformation for some other reason can quickly spread through the internet. Trustworthy healthcare institutes and sources need to identify and combat this misinformation fast.
How Signal is currently being used to help healthcare professionals
An individual impersonating a doctor was discovered online
The individual was selling fake drugs to customers using their persona as a healthcare professional to give out medical advice and push the sales of fake drugs. By using Signal this threat was discovered and action is taken to prevent further damages.
fake prescription drugs found online
Several examples have been discovered by Signal customers of their drugs online from unofficial vendors. Upon closer inspection, these drugs were not theirs but fake replicas. Signal was used to closely monitor dark web forums where these drugs were for sale as well as fake sites on the surface web where they were more openly available to customers. Using customised searches the fake prescription drugs were quickly located and the threat to customers and the companies reputations removed.
Discovered sensitive leaked patient information.
After a system hack, a healthcare institute using Signal was able to identify some of their patient’s records for sale on the dark web. Whilst the data can’t be retrieved, with this knowledge preventative measure can be and were put in place to minimise the risk of these data sets being fraudulently used.
Threats against staff are uncovered from dissatisfied patients
By using Signal’s sentiment analysis tool, Spotlight, users can determine the emotions behind posts to determine whether or not posts deserve further analysis or attention. This helps users cut through the noise.
Dangerous misinformation caught being spread about COVID-19
Using Signal a dangerous piece of misinformation about COVID-19 was identified. It was particularly harmful as it was being portrayed as an internal hospital memo however, upon inspection the information whilst believable was entirely incorrect. By identifying the misinformation that was being spread healthcare professionals were able to counter with verified and accurate information.
Summary
Signal is an open source intelligence platform that enables efficient monitoring of content in blogs and posts on the surface, deep, and dark web. This allows users to detect and identify potential threats to their business, customers, and assets and then establish effective preventative measures to protect against those threats.
Don’t Wait For The News To Tell You About A Threat Outside
Part of Signal’s job is to aggregate online notifications around threats to buildings and the staff inside which affect business and personal safety in various ways. Monitoring online traffic like this can be the fastest way to notify any business of evolving threats.
When Nur Islam became frustrated over a routine withdrawal at a Commonwealth Bank branch in Melbourne on November 18 2016, he poured petrol onto the carpet and set the building on fire, injuring himself and dozens of others.
The $2.5 million building in Springvale was soon destroyed.
Some of the first alerts to Commonwealth Bank’s staff, executives, owners, patrons and passers-by came from social media posts and ‘What we know so far’-style updates from online newspapers, full of urgent bits of information.
Lives were irreversibly changed that day; millions of dollars in insurance had to be paid out; injured staff had to be compensated and healed. Commonwealth Bank also had to protect customers’ sensitive information while ensuring communications around the attack were accurate and helpful.
Get Faster Responses to Developing Danger
Part of Signal’s job is to aggregate online notifications around threats to buildings and the staff inside which affect business and personal safety in various ways.
Signal monitors online traffic, from social media to news to emergency alerts to the dark web, and can be set to notify any business instantly about:
Fire and weather emergencies that might spill over into my building.
Political events happening, from nearby terrorism to far-away occurrences
Issues at airports, from terrorism to flight delays to blizzards
Signal lets users with large assets, distributed workforces and global reach especially large corporations and top banks in Australia, NZ and the US, pre-empt, prevent and develop strategic responses to emerging situations.
Watch The Web and Respond Faster
Signal Open Source Intelligence assists a business’s 'Duty of Care' by:
Letting you be the first to know – saving precious minutes
Covering many platforms – enabling you to monitor local and global events through news, social media and emergency services
Increasing situational awareness by corroborating real-time visual data
Monitoring community chatter and reputation in the incident aftermath
Signal lets you monitor everything affecting your organisation’s real and potential crises, staff safety, supply chain, fraud risks, cyber security and reputation – not to mention threats to your buildings whether from humans or hurricanes.
Signal has a global customer base that includes major corporations across finance, retail, pharmaceutical, and technology industries who utilize Signal to stay aware of potential threats to safety and security.
In Australia and New Zealand, Signal uses heightened situational awareness and real-time intelligence to monitor, gather, and analyse potential risks then make informed decisions to speed incident response time while reducing overhead costs.
Don’t let a failure to watch the web cost your company.