Three Keys to Staying Ahead of Risk Using PAI

Risk is everywhere, from cyber-hacking, to counterfeit goods flooding the market, to threats against key personnel and more. Countering risk goes beyond preparing for a response. Ideally, you’d be able to identify threats before they have a major impact.

That sort of complete situational awareness takes data - both the kind you collect and the ever-expanding sources of online information. This publicly available information (PAI) can help you get ahead of threats by feeding into open source intelligence (OSINT), but only if you can find, sort, and make sense of the parts that matter to you.

There are two fundamental barriers to achieving this: first, how can you assess all relevant data, no matter what language it’s in, from the massive array of available sources? Second, how can you turn any raw data collected into actionable information in time to make a difference?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is part of the answer. But AI needs to support a PAI-focused strategy — one that enables you to discover relevant information, decipher meaningful insights, and empower your people to make critical decisions faster. 

A three-pronged solution for mitigating risk

The advantage of using PAI to generate OSINT is to help you spot online content that could translate to real-world risk. This content can take many forms, including blog posts, videos, public records, social media posts (including emojis and symbols), news stories, graphics, and audio clips, just to name a few.

A three-step process enables you to make use of that content, to quickly identify, analyze, and act on potential risks and threats:

#1: Discover — knowing what you don’t know

Your journey starts with searching those online sources. But that means going beyond typical web searches to uncover sources that are harder to find, including the deep web and dark web. Unfortunately, manual searches have two major limitations: time and relevance. Entering all possible search terms in a linear fashion — including variations on words, slang, “code words,” and similar concepts and ideas — will take more resources and time than most organizations have. Adding complexity to the situation, with almost 50% of the web written in languages other than English, you need to be sure you’re capturing the nuances of local speech patterns, dialects, and meanings — elements that can easily be lost in simple translations.

In the face of these immense challenges, you need automation. Look for a technology that can search for “near-misses” as well as exact matches for keywords, one that uses advanced AI to match words to relevant ideas, in hundreds of native languages, without needing to translate it first.

#2: Decipher — making connections to uncover meaning

Once you’ve captured relevant information, you need to filter out noise, to focus only on the content that matters. You need to filter for location, people, keywords, time, and language to narrow the results.

Just as important, you need to determine intent. Does a threat actor or group have the intent and the means to take some kind of action? It’s crucial to spot the difference between blowing off steam and actually planning harm or disruption.

AI-powered analytics can identify patterns and entities at machine speed, so humans can determine which risks are credible — and take action to address them.

#3: Empower — from decision to action

Data-driven decisions depend on the quality of the inputs as well as the speed and accuracy of the analysis. Properly-designed technology can provide greater situational awareness, powering more complete risk assessments and responses.

Advanced AI-powered tools can highlight potentially risky activity and chatter online in order to alert users to take rapid action. This can not only help you mitigate risk in the short term, but it also supports long-range planning to keep you ahead of threats — and the competition.

Countering risk with PAI

Technology can support faster, more complete information gathering and quicker reactions, keeping you ahead of potential risks and supporting better outcomes. A key challenge is finding the right tools to harness the hidden value of PAI, then empower your teams to make the right decisions.

Babel Street’s technology enables you to ask the right questions, collect and analyze relevant results and uncover deep insights to inform your next moves. Our Multi-Language Smart Search breaks down language barriers, with a “thesaurus” that identifies words, phrases, slang, and subtext in more than 200 languages. This is much more than translation; this is understanding the context behind the words.

Our technology makes searches faster, more complete, and more relevant — even across the deep and dark web. And our AI-powered analysis engine provides the ability to help you mitigate risk faster, whatever the source.

Download our free PAI playbook.