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.
Seeing in the Dark - Exposing the Dark Web
In 2017 we launched our dark web monitoring functionality. From there we have evolved it into an invaluable part of our security intelligence offering which is used by corporate security teams across the globe.
There is plenty of online information regarding the dark web – mostly accurate, although it can be daunting to understand the various nuances. There are numerous benefits that come with monitoring of the dark web.
When it comes to dark web monitoring, Signal risk intelligence software offers a comprehensive service which enables security professionals to gain increased situational awareness using targeted, highly relevant data gathered from dark web sources.
Why did we add Dark Web monitoring to Signal threat intelligence software?
The Dark Web is the place to lurk out of sight, with complete anonymity, which makes it a logical centre for criminals to gather, discuss illegal activity, and sell illegal goods and services. Because of this, those bodies and security teams which are able to effectively monitor the blogs, forums, and chat rooms of the dark web have an invaluable source of information on nefarious or illegal activities - and are often among the very first to know about important and relevant information that may impact their company or organisation.
Advanced warning for things like data breaches, reputational risks and physical threats to assets allow companies to effectively form strategies to deal with and mitigate the threats to their organisations.
These conversations and activities are highly relevant to many Signal subscribers, hence the addition of the Dark Web as a data source for Signal Gold subscribers in 2017.
Read our articles:
Examples of activities that have been identified from dark web content include:
Online markets selling stolen and fake goods
Impersonation of individuals or organizations
Details in regard to hacking or incitement to hack
Reputational risk via fake news or impersonation
Illegal activities such as drugs and drug paraphernalia
One of the benefits that Signal provides is the ability to review the dark web post content without needing to utilize a Tor browser – simply review the content from within your Signal browser session.
Dark web monitoring is available for Signal subscribers with a gold or better subscription– if you are interested in more information in regard Signal or the dark web content, then contact us info@signalpublicsafety.com
The Power of Emotional Analysis - introducing Signal Spotlight
In 2018 we launched Signal Spotlight! This feature allows users to analyse the emotion behind potential threats to determine associated risk. Signal users get a real-time overview of the emotional state of Signal search results to better understand the emotional drive behind identified threat intelligence.
Signal Spotlight provides a real-time overview of the emotional state of Signal search results. Using Signal Spotlight, Signal users can better understand the prevalence and drivers of emotions and what is happening in real-time.
Spotlight taps into the results from Signal search criteria across many data sources to better understand the prevalence and drivers of emotions. For example, during an incident or event, an important attribute is how people are feeling about what has happened and how the emotional state may be changing real-time as that incident/event unfolds.
The Spotlight underlying technology uses a large vocabulary of emotion terms that were compiled from multiple sources, including the ANEW and LIWC corpora, and a list of moods from LiveJournal. In addition, a crowdsourcing task was run to organise these terms against Parrott's hierarchy of emotions. The emotions are colour-coded using a dataset of affective norms provided by the Center for Reading Research at Ghent University.
Spotlight leverages technology and research undertaken by the Language and Social Computing team in the Digital Economy Programme of CSIRO's Digital Productivity Flagship and originally developed as a joint project between computer scientists at CSIRO and mental health researchers at The Black Dog Institute.
Reference
Milne, D., Paris, C., Christensen, H., Batterham, P. and O'Dea, B. (2015) We Feel: Taking the emotional pulse of the world. In the Proceedings of the 19th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2015), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, August 2015.
[Infographic] Terror on the streets of Melbourne
Unfortunately, no-one is exempt from terror events happening as was the case in Melbourne on Friday 9th November 2018. During events of this nature it is critical to get rapid information from a variety of sources.
Unfortunately, no-one is exempt from terror events happening as was the case in Melbourne on Friday 9th November 2018. During events of this nature it is critical to get rapid information from a variety of sources.
Signal customers were quickly able to identify the existence of the incident and gather on-going information related to the incident.
Read on to see information gathered by Signal in infographic format.
[Infographic] Hurricane Harvey victims take to social media
When catastrophic events strike, emergency services are seeing a growing reliance on social media by those affected. Citizens are going online to ask for help, mark themselves as safe and support relief efforts.
When Hurricane Harvey struck Texas at the end of August 2017, due to the scale of the disaster, traditional tools were unable to cope.
Although unprecedented in modern history, the impact of Harvey shows that agencies need to recognize the importance of channels like social media.
With our analysis, we have pinpointed aspects that occurred during the event. Post-event recovery is another area where additional situational awareness can be gained ... but that’s a topic for another blog.
Read on for all the information we gathered in infographic format.
Case Study: How Emergency Management Victoria Leverage Social Media Intelligence To Their Advantage
Justin Kibell, Manager of Operational Intelligence, Emergency Management Victoria
We spoke with one of our customers, Justin Kibell - the Manager of Operational Intelligence for Emergency Management Victoria (EMV), to see what he thought the most important uses for monitoring online data were, when emergencies arose.
Here's what Justin had to say:
One of the key principles we use in our Intelligence section is to consider a broad range of information from different sources and agencies. Open source is a key source of information directly from the community, but it comes with a lot of noise.
It can often be difficult to locate the key pieces of information and this is why we have been using Signal to assist us with efficiently gathering and collating open source content across a range of platforms.
The key drivers for information gathering from social media platforms are similar to that of other information channels monitored by Intelligence Analysts. Open source information such as social media provides an opportunity to corroborate information from other sources and in some cases discover additional (important) information shared directly by the public who are on scene or potentially impacted.
"... Intelligence Analysts utilise the powerful search and monitoring features of Signal..."
Our Intelligence Analysts utilise the powerful search and monitoring features of Signal to search through various open source streams to locate information across a range of intelligence requirements such as:
1. Gauging Public Sentiment – to assist the social media team in our Public Information team, we use Signal to help determine what the community is saying about the emergency and the Governments response, both positive and negative.
2. Monitor News Coverage – searching local and interstate news websites, journalists and associated influencers, we use Signal to help obtain a bird’s eye view of what media are reporting which we pass onto the Public Information team to address and minimise misinformation.
3. Situational Awareness – using Signal to search and collate information from videos, images and descriptions of damage posted online is incredibly useful to our analysts both in building a more complete picture of what is going on (including known and potential impacts), but also in assisting our predictive services team with on scene observations which help validate their modelling such as photos with smoke plumes and fire behaviour showing.
4. Survey Damaged Areas – pinpointing the worst hit areas with observations directly from the community assists us in more efficiently deploying resources to areas with the most need. The geo-located content he at map feature quickly highlight key areas of interest.
"... using Signal for over two years now"
At the State Control Centre we have been using Signal for over two years now. Our Intelligence Analysts have positively commented on improvements to the usability and features of the tool and look forward to using the new information offered through the new “Spotlight” functionality.
Over the last three years our social media emergency management intelligence capability has grown and throughout this period Signal has been an important and valuable tool in the tool chest used by our team.
Justin Kibell, Manager of Operational Intelligence, EMV
Justin's experience with Signal demonstrates the various benefits social media offers for emergency management intelligence.
How are you using open source intelligence in your emergency response efforts?
Are You Staying Alert for Changes in Your Supply Chain?
When a factory in Reddi-wip’s supply chain suffered an explosion, little did they know that in a couple of months the resulting shortage of their popular canned cream brand (produced by ConAgra Foods) would blow up online.
By December, just as the Christmas season got into full swing, terms such as "Whippocalypse" and "Creamageddon" began trending on social media. The lack of canned cream for apple pie and pumpkin spiced lattes was causing an uproar online in the US.
What could ConAgra have done to prevent this?
Corporations like ConAgra should have active monitoring in place for their entire supply chain, to help ensure they are notified of any incidents and can take action as quickly as possible.
This gives additional time to help mitigate risk and prepare crisis comms to both staff, their distribution network and the community.
In some cases, early alerts give corporations enough time to initiate a plan B, avoiding a crisis altogether.
Is your corporation monitoring their supply chain?
If not, here are just a few more good reasons they should:
- Your executive team will be praising you for the early "heads up"
- You're ultimately protecting forecast revenue and future business opportunities
- Your executive team will have more time to initiate a plan B, or at least put together a solid PR plan
- Your operations team will have more time to redistribute their production line workers onto other tasks
Don't be the last to find out critical information. Ensure you know everything that's going on with your supply chain and be the first to know when news of a crisis breaks online. Gather situational awareness from Open Source Intelligence to stay one step ahead when disaster strikes.
6 Ways Gatlinburg Emergency Teams Could Have Increased the Safety of Residents After The Wildfire
Whilst 14 lives were tragically lost during the Gatlinburg wildfire, this number may have been higher without many residents posting photos and videos of the blaze online.
In the past, this sea of information in and around a disaster zone did not exist. But in today's world it brings with it an opportunity to save lives through insight not previously available.
Here are six easy ways emergency responders could have used this information in order to increase safety in the community during and after the wildfire.
1. Monitor for instances of online vitriol and hate speech (especially as there was possibly a suspect behind the incident):
2. Monitor ‘vigilante justice’ and ensure any manhunt-style posts are kept both accurate and under control:
3. Corroborate online updates that include photos and footage of the incident, to increase situational awareness – all of which could help fire investigators after the fact.
As arson was suspected, these posts could also be used to help find witnesses:
4. Monitor posts informing when the town would be reopening
It is important to keep an eye on these to ensure they are accurate and to pinpoint any misinformation before it spreads.
5. Stay informed as to what complementary agencies are communicating to the public and other public service announcements, to ensure statements are both accurate and align with your efforts
6. Stay informed of public opinion on how agencies are responding to the disaster
If you’re not monitoring social media during a disaster, you are missing out on important intelligence and don’t have the full picture.
To see how Signal can help you be more situationally aware during an emergency, watch the short demo or request a full demo from one of our team.
9 Things Emergency Management Teams Can Learn From Japan's Tsunami Warning
In November 2016 when a significant earthquake triggered a tsunami warning in Japan, citizens were quick to take to social media to share information of what was happening around them. The following are the 9 key ways in which Emergency Management teams can learn from Japan's online events.
1. Stay alert to possible ‘trolling’ or deliberate misinformation:
2. Monitor facts & figures that are being broadcast by citizens. Notice ‘trending’ information as it arises. Are Retweets accurate?
3. Citizen-sourced information on damaged or at risk areas:
4. Monitor the Public Service Announcements are being communicated:
Does the information match up or are there conflicting announcements?
5. Descriptions of damage and ongoing effects of the disaster:
6. Non-urgent questions from the public about the Tsunami:
7. Monitor response in the surrounding areas to the disaster zone and stay aware of requests for help:
8. Monitor what news coverage is being observed – for both information and misinformation:
9. Monitor citizens marking themselves as safe and adding to the situational awareness picture (safe areas etc.):
The online play-by-play of Japan's tsunami warning shows just how critical it is for Emergency Management teams to be monitoring social media when a natural disaster hits - it is no longer just a 'nice-to-have'.
To see how Signal can help you, watch the short demo or request a full demo from one of our team.
Are Emergency Services Doing These 7 Important Things During an Earthquake?
Image by Nasa.
2016 NZ Earthquake Infographic
On Monday the 14th November, just after midnight, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked New Zealand, shaking up the capital city of Wellington and wreaking havoc in the coastal town of Kaikoura. We took to Signal to see who was tweeting about the quake on the #EQNZ hashtag, and found some great examples of how open source intelligence can be useful for disaster response teams.
The scale of the disaster
To give you an idea of the scope of the disaster, in the 12 hours from 6am to 6pm on Tuesday, Geonet recorded 313 quakes, bringing the total since the initial earthquake to 1,212.
Initially considered a magnitude 7.5 shock, it was later upgraded to a 7.8 – making it the largest earthquake in NZ since the 7.8 Dusky Sound quake of July 2009.
While Wellington residents were being advised to stay out of the city, Kaikoura residents were trapped in their town due to landslides blocking the road.
Who was talking about the earthquake online?
#EQNZ tweets globally (First 24hrs):
#EQNZ tweets in New Zealand (First 24hrs):
#EQNZ Tweets for Wellington (First 24hrs):
So, what should Emergency Services have been doing?
1. Searching for Cries for Help:
2. Monitoring for Misinformation or Trolling:
3. Being Situation Aware:
4. Monitoring Worldwide Media Sources from Internationally Reputable Publishers:
5. Monitor what is being said by complementary disaster response agencies:
6. Monitor what local news channels are saying:
7. Monitor Public Service Announcements and what's being communicated to the public:
As you can see from the above, the aftermath of the earthquake was played out online from many different aspects. Without access to all of this chatter, Emergency Services are missing key puzzle pieces of 'the bigger picture'.
To see how Signal can help you, watch the short demo or request a full demo from one of our team.