NEW YORK, Feb. 2, 2021 – Cobwebs Technologies announced today that several government agencies have deployed their AI-powered WEBINT platform to gain situation insight during major events this month that resulted in civil unrest and, in some cases, escalated into violent acts such as destroying property and inflicting bodily harm. The government agencies used the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) solution of Cobwebs to analyze web data for gaining situational awareness surrounding the public events using various criteria for subjects of interest. These active, automated, and ongoing searches allowed for identifying threat actors known for instigating social unrest and to pinpoint hotspots in real-time to prevent escalations.

Social unrest had become a global problem that often triggers further consequences resulting in secondary risks outside of the area in which the unrest originally occurred. To address this problem, the OECD/IFP has launched its project on Future Global Shocks titled “Social unrest”. In this report, the OECD/IFP points out that social unrest is the result of a dynamic process that requires an understanding of the present situation in terms of stage dynamics and initiating the appropriate actions to de-escalate the situation and prevent repetition.

“Social network content is a great source for gaining situational awareness”, stated a US crime center officer. “Threat actors, like all other netizens, post information about their activities on the web NA, PHO. Cobwebs’ analytics platform enables government agencies to quickly and accurately collect and analyze these huge amounts of open-source data in near real-time for analysis and actionable insights.”

The advanced features of the platform, such as AI, machine learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP), analyzed the OSINT data content posted in foreign languages. The predefined threats dictionaries allowed for defining a list of key terms to search for. Once found one or more of these key terms, the platform issued alerts in the user-friendly GUI as pop-ups on the screen and also sent these alerts by email and produced a report. The assistant feature enables searches utilizing data that was already collected. This was especially useful since lead information was already present in the form of usernames of threat actors. The government agencies were also able to anonymously and automatically collect relevant content across social media after the event for follow-up.

“In general, our solution empowers policy decision-makers, on-the-ground first responders, security forces, and epidemiological research teams to manage, mitigate, and prevent emergency events. These events require a comprehensive solution to prevent and protect from events that could endanger the safety of the general public from significant danger, a risk to public health, injury, property damage, and other criminal activities as well as potential disasters,” added Udi Levy, Co-Founder & CEO of Cobwebs Technologies.