Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) has become a pervasive term. This information is collected from publicly available sources such as the Internet, radio frequencies, airwaves and newspapers. OSINT includes information or data that is openly available for anyone to access. The term, coined by the intelligence community, is commonly used in the government and military, and more increasingly by the commercial marketplace. However, as more people, and even companies, are joining social media networks and depending on social media for communication, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, OSINT has evolved into what we now call SOSINT.
Social media content is a highly valuable asset from which important insights can be gleaned whether you are a litigator, hiring manager, law enforcement officer, small business owner or a Fortune 500 executive. With our vast experience in social media investigations, SMI has become the leader in SOSINT technology and services. We continuously search the top social media sites and constantly monitor new and growing networks.
Acquiring Meaningful and Actionable Data
An Edison Research study recently found that 67% of Americans are using some form of social networking site. Every minute of every day, billions of people worldwide are posting social information; all of which establishes a public, searchable, content-rich legacy for anyone who spends time on social media or the Internet. Decision-makers who are trying to manage risk by making high value decisions in a cost-effective manner can leverage SOSINT because of its relevant, real-time, meaningful and actionable data. With the amount of information at your fingertips and the flood of results following an online search utilizing SOSINT sources, information literacy is more important than ever. It’s not just about finding information, but understanding whether those sources are trusted.
While search engines are still a primary tool for research, your query may produce poorly referenced data or worse—data from sources that are not trustworthy. Anyone can create a blog, website or social media profile and disseminate information to the public. The challenge is sifting through search results to unearth meaningful data. Even if you find what you believe is reliable information, in many cases you may have to delve further and search additional SOSINT resources to determine whether that data is any good. This becomes a time-consuming and exhausting process. That is where SMI comes in…. We use proprietary algorithms to scour SOSINT sources for only the most relevant and precise results. Using this technology and our accurate identifiers, we can isolate on specific individuals for searches and ignore other profiles with similar or the same name and location.
Monitoring Social Media Sites
SMI is the leader in SOSINT technology and services, our products are easy to use and remove the need for specialized knowledge of ever-changing social media networks, search technologies, and the deep web. We compile social media activities into one discovery analytics and recording platform to find incredibly specific information for lawyers, administrators, executives and investigators. Using our sophisticated software and tools, we can perform thorough litigation support, risk management research, and fraud investigation. The SMI team of experts developed an easy-to-use and cost-effective platform for managing your social media investigations. Our robust software incorporates data from traditional search engines, social media sites, the deep web, and even structured databases to help with your social media research.
Saving You Time and Money
SMI’s innovative solutions reduce the time of collecting, organizing and analyzing social media information and data from SOSINT sources. For example, our SMI Search Spider—built on our own technology—will automatically collect, score and prioritize link matches to biographic search terms across social networks, blogs, news sites, commercial search engines and archived websites. SMI Search Spider crawls the web to search publicly available data from search engines and social media channels. Since we provide simple open source intelligence research analysis reporting and management, our results are reliable, fast and accurate. In addition to our automated software, we also use a highly trained person to provide our clients with relevant and repeatable results. More importantly, it saves you time so you can focus on other pertinent matters.
