OSINT-WM Inaugural Talk

The world of information is seeing almost as much change today as it did back in the early 16th century when moveable type bookprinting was invented by Johannes Gutenberg. It took him some time to print his world famous 42 line bible, but just a few years later the technology had advanced so rapidly that Martin Luthers 95 theses could be disseminated in about 300.000 copies in two years! Early this year the rise of social networks has shown to be phenomenal. The number of queries in Facebook has for the first time surpassed the number of queries in Google. The number of Tweets reaches 50m per day. Although there is also news that indicates that Twitter is actually on the decline. Email is certainly on the decline, gradually being replaced by communication through social networks. Crime too, makes increased use of the Net and social networks. Microsoft claims 50bn spam messages per day. Ebay is increasingly being used for fraud. It is so much easier to steal 10 euro about 50 million times than to break in a bank or two for which you need the whole night. Banks in the NL are victims of fraud, many webshops considered to be a Walhalla of fraud. People are very careless with the Internet. On Twitter it is completely normal to inform the world you are NOT at home (www.pleaserobme.com). Remember the Dragon Hack? And the break in attempts at Google and other big US firms, a crime attributed to PR China? Facebook and the like are even used for murder. Social networks are a gold mine for terrorists and criminals alike. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center the use of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter by militant groups grew 20% in 2009. All that data (almost) is available in open sources such as weblogs, forums, newspapers, video, SMS messages, social network sites, journals, radio broadcast, etc. The by far majority of information is no longer available in text but in some other format. We have the analysts to interpret the information, to analyse it and produce actio- - nable intelligence. What we do NOT have is scientists to create that information from the raw data. That is where you, conference delegates, come in. To produce the single, ultimate, all encompassing, universal 100% reliable algorithm to find the answers in network analyses. You have exactly three days to do it!