Some of the major threat intelligence companies started out with messaging. Indeed, that’s Flashpoint's origin story. Finding messages between Al-Qaeda operatives for US Intelligence.
Some came from another side. The administrator side, cataloging and understanding vulnerabilities, essential software updates, or compromised credentials being shared on the Dark Web.. Then we got MITRE ATT&K, Phishing, Ransomware, and the rise of the nation-state, industrial extortion and hacking shops. Theft as economic war most notably by the DPRK and Russia.
Alongside, social media grew and grew, and is now the wildest west of communications we’ve ever seen. Social media affects our lives, our economies, and our societies, and it is used to inform and harm us. Whilst we are doomscrolling and posting, so are organised bad actors, hacking minds.
What is disinformation, or foreign interference, if it isn’t a digitally served threat? Understanding this at scale in real time, and relevant to your specific defensive or offensive interests is essential.
So why are the TIPS so slow to bring it into their operations? Social Media isn’t just Telegram. It’s X, it’s Bluesky, it's Reddit, it’s thousands of forums, it’s Youtube comments, it's 4Chan, and on and on
The answer may be because it's hard. Social is just too big, or maybe some see it as cat pictures, memes, not applicable. Or it seems too expensive? Well, times have changed. They need to get with the programme.
Until now, collecting and analysing social media at scale in real or near time, from all public platforms and sources in a manageable and cost-efficient way has been either almost technically impossible, or insanely expensive (and still almost technically impossible).
It isn’t anymore. Exorde Labs has tamed it. We’ve solved all the collection problems at a huge scale and granularity. We’ve solved it with W3 and AI. Two technologies that promised us much, but have often been misdirected. They are though, a paradigm shift when applied to real-world enormous data, non-trivial problems. Pretty much every conversation in the public domain flows into us, is cleaned, verified, AI analaysed and sorted, so it can be fed back out in one usable stream of valuable relevant data, specifically so that threat intel orgs (and others) can ingest it and give the companies and orgs they protect, rich but specific, real time visibility, of what is said, and what sentiment is on social media around the defensive issues they care about.
As I write, a new clutch of information environment / disinformation startups are attacking this space. Look at Refute, Egregious, Osavul, Mantis, or the much longer established Logically AI, Faculty AI, Blackbird AI, and similar. All of these companies and many more are engaging with government, defence and national security. All of them are analysing social media at scale to defend and inform their customers.
They are all fighting for the same customers in a tight financial market, in related, overlapping information environment lanes. So what’s going to happen?
I see a damaging pile-up of all of these company types colliding in a big car crash in the middle. And if companies are cars, some of them may end up as so much scrap metal.
Let me know what you think. Agree, or disagree. and why?
Tristan Palmer
Co-CEO of Exorde Labs
#threatintel #disinformation #misinformation #ai #cyber