February 28, 2025

Recap: ISS Dubai 2025

DarkOwl participated in ISS World Middle East & Africa in Dubai, UAE earlier this February. ISS World Middle East & Africa is a conference where cybersecurity technology providers exhibit to the global law enforcement and intelligence community. ISS 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.”  

DarkOwl has attended ISS for the last 10 years as it is an effective medium to help reinforce and grow our international presence.

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. 

ISS conferences are held in various cities across the world every year like Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Prague, Singapore, and more. ISS Dubai has consistently provided valuable opportunities to engage with law enforcement, government agencies, and commercial partners across the GCC and MENA regions. 

Key Takeaways: 

✅ Industry Presence: Noticeably smaller than other ISS events, but this conference is closed to the public in part because of the strong representation from regional government agencies usually affiliated with law enforcement and intelligence. 
✅ Market Trends: We noted 12+ sessions devoted to the subject of OSINT and/or Darknet on the first day of the conference, alone. OSINT vendors more generally had a strong presence, from Epieos and OSINT Industries, to Cyabra and Cognyte. 
✅ Strategic Partnerships: Productive discussions with potential OEM partners for whom Darknet data has become essential for end user investigators, globally. Alongside existing data partners like TRG Solutions, Maltego, Innefu and IPS, there was strong interest from key regional system integrators and government AI innovators.  
✅ Speaking Session Success: Our session drew a large audience that asked several questions. The crowd was nearly 50% Emirati, but also representation from other regional agencies like the Kingdom of Jordan.  

Live Demonstration of DarkOwl Vision: Darknet Intelligence Discovery and Collection 

In addition to networking and promoting DarkOwl at the booth, Lindsay Whyte 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. 

DarkOwl 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. 

After 10 years of participating in ISS Dubai, DarkOwl will continue to attend since these events reinforce our position as the “go-to” darknet search & monitoring solution in the MENA region.  

Meet with us in person! See where we will be next.