Cyberglobes to help Telangana cops scan social media

Hyderabad: Spy agencies across India, including in Telangana state and Andhra Pradesh, are said to be in talks with the Israel-based Cyberglobes to acquire hi-tech social media analytics tools to scan and analyse social media platforms to detect messages regarding terrorist and other criminal activities, which is becoming a major challenge for law enforcement agencies.

It is learnt that some agencies have either already acquired or are in the process of acquiring the tools shortly.

Highly placed sources told Deccan Chronicle that Cyberglobes — which specialises in cyber forensics, information security and network security — has come out with the latest social media analytics tools which can be tailor-made to suit the needs of intelligence agencies.

“The Cyberglobes prevention technology covers a wide range of social networks and performs cross references between social platforms that are then made available in visual display,” sources said, adding that representatives of Cyberglobes have had meetings with key police officials in different cities including Hyderabad.

Cyberglobes recently held a display and demonstration session for a select group of police officials and cyber experts in Hyderabad to help them understand the functioning of the system.

Without going much into detail, sources chose to say that Cyberglobes has a “wide range and impressive set of products.”

They said that Cyberglobes technology includes text analysis like semantics, entity extraction and word clouds and determines influential public opinion and provides a graphical relationship map that exposes imposter profiles by drawing links between different social media outlets. “It can be very useful in preventing lone wolf attacks,” one official said.

“For the law enforcement agencies across the globe, monitoring and analysing social media has become a huge challenge. Though most agencies are using different tools, Cyberglobes systems are much more sophisticated and designed to suit the law enforcement agencies. It will go a long way in helping agencies keep track of terrorist activities and other crimes,” a senior police official said, adding that the cost of products runs into a few crores of rupees.

According to one report, the Israeli authorities have foiled over 200 Palestinian terror attacks by monitoring social media and sifting through vast amounts of data to identify prospective terrorists, much before they could execute their plans. “Improved analytical capabilities using the latest tools and gadgets is the key to thwart terror strikes anywhere in the world today and same is the case with India,” the official said.

In Telangana state, social media analytics tools have prevented would-be terrorists from travelling to Syria and joining the Islamic State but the tools, though modern, are not as advanced as Cyberglobes, sources said.