DarkOwl Expands International Presence at ISS World Middle East & Africa

March 08, 2024

Last month, DarkOwl participated in ISS World Middle East & Africa in Dubai, UAE. ISS World Middle East & Africa describes itself as “the world’s largest gathering of Regional Law Enforcement, Intelligence and Homeland Security Analysts, Telecoms as well as Financial Crime Investigators responsible for Cyber Crime Investigation, Electronic Surveillance and Intelligence Gathering,” making it the ideal event for DarkOwl to grow our international presence, build relationships in person and spread the importance of darknet data to the international intelligence and law enforcement communities.

ISS World takes pride in focusing on education and training covering the areas of law enforcement, public safety, and government and private sector intelligence communities. The first full day of ISS events are dedicated to training and in-depth sessions. Talks throughout the event cover topics ranging from geolocation, exploiting and circumnavigating masking tech, advanced techniques in tracing suspects, open-source tools, artificial intelligence, and more.

Representing DarkOwl at ISS World Middle East & Africa was David Alley, CEO of DarkOwl FZE based in Dubai and Damian Hoffman, Product Engineer and Data Analyst out of DarkOwl’s headquarters in Denver, CO. The same power duo from last year!

One of the great advantages of this show is the true international presence and overall turnout of attendees, Damian noted that there was “essentially non-stop traffic” to the booth all 3 days of the show. Visitors from the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Turkey, Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Romania, Ukraine, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, United States, UK, Germany, Italy, Greece, Israel, Rwanda, South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, and Australia and more visited the booth and/or attended our live demo session. Getting to interact face to face with prospects, clients, and partners is invaluable – especially when trying to build up an international presence and grow relationships across seas from all corners of the globe. International shows demonstrate that cyber security is a global problem, no company and no government is immune to the potential risks associated with the world going truly digital.

Common themes and topics that were brought up by attendees at the booth included: the use of Telegram by threat actors, Breachforums, and threat actor TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures). This gave David and Damian a chance to showcase one of our latest product features: Actor Explore. Actor Explore allows users to review analyst curated insights into active threat actor groups on the darknet and wider. We explore the motivations behind the groups, the tools they have used and searchable attributes to pivot on within DarkOwl Vision. Each actor profile in Actor Explore includes a detailed dossier, offering an in-depth overview of the threat actor. Additionally, DarkOwl analysts provide extensive information such as darknet fingerprints, targets, tools, CVEs, contact information, and more when available. To read further on why tracking and monitoring threat actors is important, check out our blog on this topic here.

DarkOwl is a regular sponsor of several ISS shows around the world, we will be attending ISS World Asia and ISS World Europe later in the year. You can see where we will be around the world here.

Live Demonstration of DarkOwl Vision: Darknet Intelligence Discovery and Collection

In addition to networking and promoting DarkOwl at the booth, David was able to give a live presentation to attendees demonstrating DarkOwl Vision: Darknet Intelligence Discovery and Collection. Vision UI is the industry leading platform for analysts to simply, safely, and comprehensively search the largest commercially available source of darknet data. The goal of this session was to further educate the international intelligence community on how threat actors on the darknet are evolving in their use of new tools and methodologies.

Due to the layer of anonymity it provides, the darknet is often a hub for illegal activity. However, investigating crime on the darknet and deep web poses technical challenges, including the fact that darknet sites are continually coming on and offline with pages vanishing from one minute to the next. The technology DarkOwl leverages to scrape and index hidden digital undergrounds are key to the mission of obtaining proactive situational awareness for protection of the nation’s security initiatives. Vision provides a user friendly interface with powerful querying capabilities to search, monitor, and create alerts for critical information. DarkOwl Vision has been used to support local and federal police investigations, as well as work done in intelligence/fusion centers and federal agencies to uncover human trafficking, opioid selling, terrorism, security issues, and other illegal activity, making it the perfect tool for this audience to be able to dive into.