Geo-Tagging & Location Monitoring the Dark Web

Everything in our world happens at a location

Many organizations struggle to identify and mitigate risk related to specific geographies and places. Location-based web intelligence provides this important contextual visibility into your organization’s locations, events, assets, and employees.

Location-based content offers an opportunity to use this data to augment an organization’s threat detection and physical security controls. In many cases, location-based content from the web is a faster source of information to a breaking event than breaking news or from the media.

The need to location infer content on the web

Location-based web data is content (post, image, or video) linked to a location or place. Location-based content is either natively geo-tagged by a device, application, or individual publishing the content. If location-based data is not natively tagged, there is an opportunity to use natural language processing and machine-learning technology to tag a location.

Inferred geo-tagging extracts geographic attributes from the web content and predicts the most appropriate location for the data. Up to 5% of security-relevant content on the web is natively geo-tagged. Around 35-50% of content can be location inferred, providing context-rich information about what is impacting a location, town, city, state, or country. This provides and oportunity to geo-tag content from security relevant sources such as 4chan, Telegram, Tor and other supported data sources.

Geo-tagging dark sources to maximize intelligence and risk value

We've added dark web and dark social data to our location-based intelligence capabilities and inference processing. This opens the door to discovering posts from the darker corners of the internet with a location-based & place context without having to guess keywords.

As the enclosed image below shows, geo-inferred correlation events in Ukraine are sourced from a highly subscribed Telegram account.

As we aggregate data from the surface web, social media, and dark web sources, customers with active geo-location monitors will have matching events in their specific feeds across all supported sources - natively tagged and inferred.

If you need any help with setting up geo-fences and location-based alerts, please reach out to us, and a member of the team will help you as soon as possible.