Social Links
Next-Generation Digital Investigation Intelligence

2020 was a year like no other! In the first quarter of the year, there was an unprecedented spread of the virus throughout the world, following which WHO declared a global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic brought everyday life to a standstill. It also led to a massive online footprint—work, shopping, entertainment, or social interaction, happening online. The attack avenues, not surprisingly, began multiplying as well. According to some industry reports, the initial months of the outbreak saw as high as a 400 per cent surge in cybercrimes. This naturally caused law enforcement agencies (LEA) to shift their focus to flatten this curve. The rising cybercrimes numbers, that are caused by COVID, led to the need in tools that help combat not only cybercrimes, but the crimes at all since almost every aspect of people's life is strongly connected to the digital realm in a today’s life. LEAs, like any other organisation, were not prepared for the predicaments that the pandemic had brought on. The LEA employees, who had to switch to the remote working mode, did not have the requisite operation processes for collecting evidence and investigating various crimes remotely. They needed tools for conducting quick search and analysis of information.

Enter the Netherlands-based company, Social Links.

True to its name, Social Links offers a plethora of social network analytics tools and open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions to pump up the intelligence and digital investigation quotient of LEAs. Their tools are steadfastly helping LEAs and other business enterprises elevate the manual data handling techniques to the modern standards of convenience and processing speeds. Such capabilities also enable the company to serve the needs of journalists and other research-driven business enterprises.

About six years ago, when the company was formed, Social Links was one of the first vendors in the cybersecurity solution space to provide proprietary solutions for regular users on the lower access level and comprehensive private solutions for open data gathering. The founders of the company were employees in a bank economic security department, checking client backgrounds. At that time, they realised the value of open data combined with company internal data. While internal data back then could be accessed easily, no one had any idea how to access open data from a specific site in a properly structured form and integrate them into a single data field for checks and investigations, such as fraud cases. There were no such solutions available on the market, or their cost was extremely high. This prompted them to create the service in the bank, initially, and in 2015 beyond the bank. The Social Links was born. The MVP SL BOX was successfully launched and tested among the company's key clients. An important step for the company's development, and also the OSINT industry as a whole was the launch of SL launched Gamayun, an advanced tool for more accessible online investigations.

Today, Social Links has completed re-branded itself to launch two flagship products: SL BOX and Gamayun, available Maltego, IBM i2 and Spiderfoot– a trusted intelligence analysis platform, and the company is already piloting these new solutions with the leading European police departments.

“We are soon to evolve from a company, that gives a tool to extract data and analyse it, into a company that gives a tool to extract knowledge from this data. Developing analytical models and artificial intellect will enable us to help our customers cope with the growing amount of information and the ever-increasing requirements to prompt decision-making,” says Andrew Kulikov, co-founder and CEO of the company.

At the Cutting Edge of Investigation Intelligence

SLBOX is a comprehensive solution that centralises open data collection, along with its analysis and visualisation—and can be seamlessly incorporated within a client’s existing infrastructure. Integrated with internal data sources, Social Links BOX facilitates unprecedented investigation speed. It is a comprehensive solution that is unique for the market and has everything it takes for open data collection, analysis and visualisation. “For local LEAs, SMBs, and private detectives, we recommend our SaaS solution – Social Links PRO,” says Kulikov. Social Links PRO is compatible with the most popular OSINT platforms, such as Maltego PRO and IBM i2 Analyst Notebook. In a matter of minutes, this SaaS offering can enable LEAs to access over 1,000 methods of SL data search and analysis and instantly apply them to their investigations.

However, all these products require rather extensive skills and experience in OSINT and IT. That is why Social Links also brought forth Gamayun to the market. Gamayun is a web-based solution comprising all our skills and expertise in OSINT. This service will help you explore the full potential of open data without requiring any special skills.

Driven by the competencies of these solutions and services, LEAs and private investigators can identify a cyber-attacker within minutes just by tracking phone numbers. “Once during a demo, we even busted an employee of a company who had been generating a PGP-key with the corporate email to conduct activities on the darknet,” shares Kulikov.

The paybacks of Social Links’ offerings ring even far beyond that. For instance, Kulikov mentions how their solutions were used to study the social network’s role as recruitment pools for the dark web. Besides identifying the patterns, Social Links also zeroed in on the tools that can be used to counter such illicit activities on the internet.

The Lawfare team led by Jacques Singer-Emery—a former case analyst for the NYPD Intelligence Bureau— with the help of Social Links PRO and Maltego PRO platforms conducted a study on the effectiveness of a fascist forum at connecting like-minded international racial-extremist groups in the dark web. As a result of the analysis, Jacques Singer-Emery concluded that private conversations related to recruitment, coordination, and philosophical discussions accounted for approximately 15 per cent of all the private conversations in the fascist forum.

The data used was merged from Iron March, taken from open sources and the Maltego platform supplemented by the Social Links Pro to answer the main and most important question, "How Did Iron March Connect Like-Minded White Extremists and Neo-Nazis?" Analysing these messages further provided more detail into exactly how racial-extremist groups coordinated their activities. In total, the analysis was carried out in 4.5 hours. More importantly, the entire analysis was carried out in a single working environment. “Conducting such an analysis manually was simply impossible,” claims Kulikov.

The Unique Approach

What makes Social Links stand out among the rivals and any company in the cybersecurity industry is their ability to remain open to customers and the community. “We are willing to hear out every customer and provide assistance in reaching customer's goals. Over 70 percent of new features in 2020 were developed based on our customers' feedback,” says Kulikov. The company is committed to supporting the professional OSINT community and also arranges a lot of free events. The most important thing is that Social Links does not force its investigation methods down anyone's throat. Everyone may select their best way to the goal with the Social Links' help. That is why the company’s tools are as flexible as possible, based on internal data and hundreds of our customers' collective experience. As for its internal corporate culture, Social Links goes the last mile to become great leaders and innovators in its sphere. Along with integrity in processes, the company encourages the spirit of invention and portability. “We are always ready to help our employees with their projects, even if they go beyond our industry,” says Kulikov.

In fact, Social Links has always positioned itself as a customer-driven company. From the beginning of the company, the product pipeline and updates have been mostly defined by the customers' requests. “Our customers are happy with our services and keep asking us, "Can you do this or that?" Saying "no" is not our style,” says Kulikov. Another aspect that Social Links highlights on is the technical prowess in the provision of its service. OSINT and open data represent a constantly changing heterogeneous environment, so the data gathering methods that are proper today may become improper tomorrow due to changes in technical solutions/regulations or any other things that are beyond the company or their customers' control. To keep the desired level of service accessible for its customers, Social Links has set up customer service and technical support to make its products capable of prompt responding to minor changes in the vital resources.

Today, along with such power-packed investigations, Social Links is also capitalising its resources to popularise OSINT at large, “not just our products,” says Kulikov. His strong conviction is that OSINT will not just be helpful for LEA and related segments, but it can also aid unrelated spheres like healthcare or economics. “However, our number one priority in the next three years is to help fight crime in the real and virtual environments,” informs Kulikov. In that pursuit, opening an office in the U.S. is another important step ahead of Social Links, as they are already gaining a lot of traction in that region.