Recorded Future: The Leader in Threat Intelligence with Real Time, Web Wide Analytics

In an exclusive interview with Stephen E Arnold, Recorded Future’s Jason Hines, Senior Vice President, explains Recorded Future’s advanced approach to threat detection. In the study CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access, the Google- and In-Q-Tel backed company was identified as the first mover in threat intelligence.

Threat intelligence is a field defined by Recorded Future. The ability to process massive real time content flows and then identify hot spots and items of interest allows an authorized user to identify threats and take appropriate action quickly. Fueled by commercial events like the security breach at Sony and cyber attacks on the White House, threat detection is now a core business concern.

Hines, a former Google engineer, said:

“When our team set out about five years ago, we took on the big challenge of indexing the Web in real time for analysis, and in doing so developed unique technology that allows users to unlock new analytic value from the Web.”

Hines explained that one of the key innovations at Recorded Future has been the development of algorithms and parsing technology to identify dates at which events took place, the time when content became available, and implicit dates embedded within structured or unstructured data. The Recorded Future Temporal Analytics is not a semantic and brute force process like figuring out if a text is positive or negative. Making time components available to users allows law enforcement and intelligence professionals to evaluate data through time. Key events are related to other events and these are available within a time context. A typical Google search displays information without much emphasis on time. In contrast, Recorded Future delivers the chronology of actions as part of the system’s threat forecasting functions. Before Recorded Future’s system became available, chronology usually was assembled via a manual process.

Hines added:

“When it comes to security professionals we really enable them to become more proactive and intelligence-driven, improve threat response effectiveness, and help them inform the leadership and board on the organization’s threat environment. Recorded Future has beautiful interactive visualizations, and it’s something that we hear security administrators love to put in front of top management.”

Stephen E Arnold, author of the CyberOSINT study said:

“In our review of 22 companies offering next generation solutions for law enforcement, intelligence, and security, Recorded Future helps identifies threats before they become headline news like the Anthem or Home Depot cyber thefts. The company combines an architecture which permits real time analysis with sophisticated mathematical recipes that anyone can use from a desktop or a mobile device.”

Arnold added:

Recorded Future’s technology pulls from OSINT the people, places and activities mentioned in source documents. The system scrutinizes the extracted events performing spatial and temporal analysis. It aggregates the positive/negative sentiment in the text. Recorded Future uses statistical and artificial intelligence techniques to discover relationships between and among people, events, and concepts.

About Recorded Future

Founded in 2009, the company is headquartered in Somerville, MA with offices in Arlington, VA and Gothenburg, Sweden. The team includes software engineers, data scientists, designers, linguists, and technical business people with deep expertise in security, intelligence, analysis, and visualization. The company is committed to organizing the Web in a radically new way to improve IT security. Recorded Future arms clients with real-time threat intelligence so organizations can proactively defend an organization against cyber attacks. With billions of indexed facts, and more added every day, the company’s patented Web Intelligence Engine continuously analyzes the open Web to give you unmatched insight into emerging threats. Recorded Future helps protect four of the top five companies in the world.

About ArnoldIT

Arnold Information Technology conducts research into online information and services. Founded by Stephen E Arnold in 1991, the company has provided technology services to organizations worldwide.