New Scary Narus Data Mining Tool "Hone"
Narus
is developing a new technology that sleuths through billions of pieces
of data on social networks and Internet services and connects the dots.
The
new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law
enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who are now operating
anonymously on the Internet.
In
many ways, the cyber world is ideal for subversive and terrorist
activities, said Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus.
“For bad people, it’s an easy place to hide,” Nucci said. “They can get
lost and very easily hide behind a massive ocean of legal digital
transactions.”
It’s trivial to
set up a Gmail or Facebook account under a fake name. The question for
law enforcement then becomes, how does it connect different pieces of
information to the same person? “It’s very hard to connect these two
pieces of information,” Nucci said. “We’re really asking [law
enforcement] to become almost like magicians.”
Narus
is best known as the creator of NarusInsight, an network monitoring
device that can analyze traffic on IP networks. AT&T
allegedly used a Narus system to wiretap customer data on behalf of the
U.S. National Security Agency as part of a U.S. domestic terrorist
surveillance program.
Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci’s own admission, however, it can do some pretty “scary” things.
The
software’s user creates a target profile, and Hone then proceeds to
link what Nucci calls “islands of information.” Hone can analyze VOIP
conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and
then associate it with different phone numbers.
“I
can have a sample of your voice in English, and you can start speaking
Mandarin tomorrow. It doesn’t matter; I’m going to catch you.”
It
uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to
different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. “It’s going
to go through a set of documents and automatically it’s going to
organize them in topics — I’m not talking about keywords as is done
today, I’m talking about topics,” he said.
That
can’t be done with today’s technology, he said. “If you search for
fertilizers on Google… it’s going to come back with 6.5 million pages.
Enjoy,” he said. “If you want to search for non-farmers who are
discussing fertilizer… it’s not even searchable.”
Hone
will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with
similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e-mail
address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by
studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and
work addresses of people.
Another component can trace the location of someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or phone.
Bit by bit, it pieces together the subject’s different identities on the Internet.
Narus
is still testing the waters with Hone. Working with a consortium of
universities, the company has used Hone to sift through massive amounts
of public information. “We started to collect data three years ago and
we’ve gone through several programs,” Nucci said. “We have something
like 75 million users in our system.” With the permission of users,
Nucci’s team also analyzed data on about 50,000 private profiles.
Nucci will discuss Hone at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Friday.
The
company is now talking to potential customers such as defense
contractors and government agencies to see if there’s enough interest to
turn Hone into a product. “If the market is as big as we guess it’s
going to be, then we will start rolling this into products,” Nucci said.
That day could be just a year away, he added.
Excellent work. It's a narrow way into the light, not everyone is capable of it.
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