December 30, 2024

As 2024 comes to a close, our content and marketing teams are taking a moment to reflect on the exciting events, trends, and changes the DarkOwl team experienced throughout the year. We’re eagerly looking ahead to a successful and prosperous 2025 and extend our best wishes to all our customers, partners, and readers! Thank you for your support over the past year—your engagement, readership, and willingness to share our content means the world to us.

We hope you continue to find the topics we explore valuable, enlightening, and engaging. One final marketing reminder for the year: be sure to sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay updated on the latest insights from our research and content teams!

DarkOwl Around the World

Trade Shows and Events

DarkOwl made the rounds this year traveling all over the world for trade shows and speaking sessions and we are so glad to be able to see our customers, partners, and prospects face to face. In 2024, the team attended several events all around the world from San Francisco, Las Vegas, Tampa, Omaha, Dubai, Riyadh, Singapore, Lille, Nuremberg, and more. Thank you to everyone who sat down with DarkOwl along the way. We hope to see even more you on the road in 2025. Check out where we will be in 2025 and request time to meet here.

Employee Fun and Events

The team not only traveled the globe for client meetings and conferences but also had plenty of fun back at DarkOwl’s headquarters in Denver, CO! With an increasingly remote-friendly workforce and a focus on attracting top talent, ensuring that everyone at DarkOwl remains connected has never been more important.

2 years ago, we adopted an owl! This year we renewed that adoption again! He jumped early from his Michigan nest in 2015 and fractured his right wing in two places and was on the ground for about a week next to a barn before he was picked up by the landowners and brought to a rehabilitation center. He was sent to the Raptor Education Foundation in Denver in August, 2016 where he now lives. You can learn more about him on his dedicated adoption page. 

We love our #Pets!

Gotta show some pet love as well from our Pets Slack Channel (the best channel).😻

Yearly reminder: DarkOwl analysts and their pets recommend you never use your pet’s name in any password combination as it is a popular term for threat actors using brute force attacks.

New Product Enhancements

At DarkOwl, we prioritize learning from our customers to ensure our products consistently deliver value. We are dedicated to enhancing our dark web data solutions with features tailored to the needs of analysts and threat intelligence teams. Here are some highlights from this year.

DarkOwl Purchases Certain Assets of Skurio Ltd.

In April, DarkOwl LLC announced that it has purchased certain assets of Skurio Ltd from the Administrators Keenan CF Ltd, effective March 22, 2024. These assets include certain customer information, source code, and other commercial material.

DarkOwl Revolutionizes Forum Data Analysis with Enhanced Structuring

DarkOwl announced a groundbreaking upgrade to its platform, empowering users with unparalleled insights into darknet forums. The new forum structuring feature represented a significant leap forward in data analysis, streamlining the user experience and enhancing the ability to extract actionable intelligence.

This evolution toward a more sophisticated approach allowed users to navigate darknet discussions like never before. DarkOwl enabled clients to reconstruct conversations in chronological order accurately and effortlessly, improved search capabilities, and streamlined navigation—empowering clients to uncover critical insights with ease.

Access to forum data, encompassing discussions on topics such as leaks, hacking, fraud, and more, in a structured format proved vital for organizations aiming to fortify their cybersecurity defenses and stay ahead of emerging threats. Additionally, forum usernames and enhanced user search capabilities facilitated deeper social and threat actor analysis. Clients could track threat actors’ activities across multiple threads and investigate all their communications within a particular forum. This advancement enhanced analysts’ ability to connect disparate pieces of information and identify emerging trends or patterns effectively.

Figures 1 and 2 (left to right): Previous view of a thread versus new enhanced view

Direct to Darknet

The team released “Direct to Darknet” within Vision UI in partnership with Authentic8, a leading provider of cloud-based secure browsing solutions. This feature allows users to further investigate Vision UI search results on forums, marketplaces, and other Onion sites. This can be helpful for an investigation to view the original website, view images or advertisements that may be on the sites, take a screenshot for reporting, and more. By combining DarkOwl’s comprehensive darknet database and monitoring capabilities with Authentic8’s Silo cloud browser, which is known for its secure browsing environment, organizations will gain unprecedented visibility and protection against cyber threats surfacing on the darknet.

Website Mentions

One of our most requested features from clients went live earlier this year! Website Mentions is a feature extraction in our dataset, which provides more inclusive searching and monitoring for domain results. This helps you surface more results when you search—such as results with subdomains as well as domains within URLs. 

Site Context for Forums

Site Context is information from the DarkOwl analyst team that gives additional enrichment about search results. This includes the Site Name and any aliases, and may include relevant dates or other information. Where available, options to pivot to Actor Explore, or to pivot to search associated Telegram channels will be present.

Jennifer Ewbank Joins DarkOwl Board of Directors

In August, Jennifer Ewbank, former Deputy Director of the CIA for Digital Innovation and founder of Andaman Strategic Advisors, joined the DarkOwl Board of Directors.

Ewbank brings decades of experience spanning technological innovation, operating expertise, geopolitical risk management, strategic global engagements and public-private partnerships.  As Deputy Director of the CIA for Digital Innovation, Ewbank guided what was a start-up inside the organization to a fully operational global team. Ewbank also led her global workforce in developing a competitive digital strategy, realigning projects to mission partners’ top priorities, and promoting integrated technical development across organizational boundaries. She also named the CIA’s first Director for AI and sponsored an ambitious AI strategy to achieve competitive advantage over global adversaries.

We are thrilled to have her on the team!

Clients Seeing Increased Demand for Dark Web OSINT

We understand how incredibly challenging it is to maintain insight into everything the threat actors have insight into. This year, we put an emphasis on leveraging our company’s expertise in darknet technology to gather the data that allows our clients and their customers to stay ahead of potential threats.

Newly announced partnerships include: 

---

Don’t miss any updates from DarkOwl in 2025 and get weekly content delivered to your inbox every Thursday.