Forensics Pathways win award funding cybercrime detection project
Leading threat intelligence company Forensics Pathways Ltd and its academic partner Aston University (Aston Institute for Forensics Linguistics) have been awarded Innovate UK 's SMART award.
This recognition will provide funding fort he LEADS-ENGINE (Linguistically Enabled Analytic Dark Search Engine) project which will run for 18 months.
The project will develop innovative techniques for the detection and prediction of cybercrime and fraud on the dark web.
It will build on Forensic Pathways ' technology 'Dark Search Engine ' (DSE), and will provide clients with actionable intelligence they can use to enhance their protection measures/systems.
The UK National Fraud and Cyber Crime Dashboard (NFB) shows that, to date in 2021, organisations have been impacted by 57,304 fraud-related cybercrimes, costing £637.4m.
There has been a 64 per cent rise in cyber-attacks with the shift to remote/home working (mimecast.com).
While there are multiple dark-web monitoring tools/services, they lack the ability to automatically identify threats based on linguistic and behavioural patterns, which currently requires extensive manual analysis using techniques like Forensic Linguistics.
Forensic Pathways Limited (FPL) is a Birmingham-based SME that has provided investigation, due diligence, threat intelligence/cyber security services for 21 years.
FPL developed DSE, an automated crawler/scraper of the Tor Onion Browser - an anonymous browser, in order to provide an additional level of intelligence to companies wishing to monitor the dark web for the illegal sale of assets, bank details, client data and email accounts, for example.
DSE has currently indexed over 55 million URLs, with the database updating every four hours. Previously, International Business Machines Corporation(IBM) has quoted over 280 days before companies are aware of a data breach and the ability to know if data has been stolen within a short time frame significantly impacts on the cost to business.
Ben Leary (pictured), director at FPL said: “Companies are used to looking to the clear net (regular internet) for information on the businesses or individuals they want to do business with or want to go through M&A, however, the open web is just one half of the picture. They are also under significant pressure to protect their data and reputations ”.
“We have teamed with Aston University 's world-leading Forensic Linguistics Institute to enable us to go beyond the monitoring/alerting state-of-the-art by providing actionable intelligence and enabling the rapid identification of new threats, feeding into risk assessment tools and adding to a continually developing database of online fraud strategies and behaviours ”.
Dr Emily Chiang of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics said: "Dark-web crime occurs almost exclusively through language. As such, linguistic methods can help establish important information about individuals and communities engaging in criminal activities".
This is the third successful Innovate UK award for Forensic Pathways and highlights the significant value in collaboration between business and universities.
For further information please contact: [email protected] or call 0121 232 4662